The Fortnightly Review,vol.20

THE

FORTNIGHTLY

REVIEW.

/j

EDITED BY

John Morley.

VOL. XX. NEW SERIES.
July i to December i, 1876.

(VOL. XXVI. OLD SER1E.S.)

LONDON: '

CHAPMAN AND HALI., 193, PICCADILLY.

1876.

[The of Translation is reservt f.]

%

'‘s/ C-JV-

MJOVIHUt Z

rBUTTED BT 'ViB.VUB JLMD CO., l.XXr

CONTENTS.

AUTHOR PAOB

^ Bagehot, Walter Adam Smith as a Person 18

Lord Althorpe o73

Bridge, Cyprian An Excursion in Formosa 214

Bridges, Dr. J. H Harvey and Vivisection 1

Bryce, James Bua^a and Turkey 793

Chamberlain, Joseph . ,*-• . Li^pland, and Notes on Swedish Licens-

ing 691

y Colvin, Sidney Daniel Dcronda 601

/ Congreve, Hichard .... England and Turkey 517

Courtney, L. H Political Machinery and Political Life . 74

Cromi'TON, Henry Mr. Cross and tho Magistracy . . . . 223

Dilke, Sir C. W. • . • . . English Influence in Japan 424

Earle, Balph A The Eastern Situation 651

/ Editor Eobespierre. 1 167

„ (Conclusion) .... 326

On Popular Culture : An Address . . 632

Freeman, E. A Tho Eastern (iuestion 409

The Law of Honour 731

Gurney, Edmund .... Some Disputed Points in Music . . . 106

Harrison, Frederic .... Past and Present 93

Cross and Crescent 709

Hartsiiorne, B. F The Eodiyas 671

Hill, Oistavia A Word on Good Citizenship .... 321

aUueefer, Franz Ai’thur Schopenhauer 773

Hutoiiinson, Jonathan . . . Cruelty to Animals 307

Jennings, L. J Unsettled Problems of American Politics 198

Jevons, Professor The Future of Political Economy . . . 617

Markham, Clements B. . . Lord Fairfax at Colchester 374

.'"^KRjDiTH, George .... Ballad of Fair Ladies in Bevolt . . . 232

Morris, W. O’Connor . , . The Irish Domesday Book ..... 364

Pater, Walter H Study of Dionysus 752

’'Pollock, Frederick .... Stephen’sDigest of Law of Evidence . 383

Butson, Albert Turkey in Europe 275

Statham, H. H Beflections at the Boyal Academy • . 60

Modem English Arcluteotare • ... 479

coiHEins.

AOTROB

PiGI

^ SutPHEir, Ledio ....

William Godwin

444

/ Sully, James . . , . .

Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Uncon-

242

^^TykdalLi Fiofossor . . .

. t r

Fermentation, and its Hearings on

Disease

547

Waixace, D. Mackenzie .

Territorial Expansion of Dussia . . .

143

WABSiMniyA

A Medieval Spanish Writer ....

809

^ WEDDEBB.UKN, Sir D. . .
/

Australasian Domocracy . . . . . .
Moimonism from a Mormon Point of

43

View

462

White, Horace ....

. The American Contenarv

496

Some and Foreign Affairs .

131, 2G3, 393, 337, 081, 833

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW

No. CXVI. New Seeies.— August 1, 1876.

THE TEREITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

I HAVE chosen as the subject of the present article the territorial
expansion of Russia, because there seems to be at present a tendency
to resuscitate the old legend about the insatiable, omnivorous Russian
Bear which is always anxiously waiting for a chance of devouring
unfortunate Turkey. When she has devoured Turkey — so runs the
legend — she will take India as her next sweet morsel, and then she
will leisurely eat up the Chinese Empire, or turn towards the setting
sun and take a copious meal on her Western frontier, Abeady one
well-known continental publicist has declared that Russia is the great
sphinx of modern times, and that Europe must guess her riddle or
consent to be devoured. The riddle, if I read the allegory aright,
is her expansive power, and it must be confessed that at first sight
this power seems truly marvellous, not to say alarming. For a
thousand years she has gone on steadily and irresistibly widening
her borders. An insignificant tribe or collection of tribes which
once occupied a small territory near the sources of the Dnieper and
Western Dwina, has gradually grown into a great nation, with a
territory of more than 370,000 geographical square miles, stretching
from the Baltic to Behring’s Straits, and from the Arctic Ocean to
the Black Sea and the Caspian. And the process of expansion is
still going on with unabated rapidity. Truly there is here a riddle
de6er\ing to be solved. What is the secret ojf this expansive power ?
Is it a mere barbarous lust of territorial aggrandisement, or is it
some more reasonable motive? And what is the nature of the
process P Is annexation of territory followed by assimilatioD, or do the
new acqm'sitions retain their old character ? Is the Empire in its
present extent a homogeneous whole, or a conglomeration of hetero-
geneous units held together by the outward bond of administration P
These and similar questions ought to have for us at the present
moment more than a purely theoretical interest. If we could discover
the nature and causes of Russia’s territorial esqpansion we mfjkt

VOL. XX. N.S, L

146

THE TEREITOEIAL EXPANSION OP ETJSSIA.

determine how far annexation strengthens or weakens her, and form
some plausible conjectures as to how, when, and where the process of
expansion is to stop.

By glancing at the history of Bussia from the economic point of
view we can at once detect two prominent causes of expansion.
These are the result, not of any ethnological peculiarity, but simply
of the fact that the Busso-Slavonians have always been an agricul-
tural people, emplojung merely the primitive methods of husbandry.
All such people have a strong tendency to w^iden their borders, and
for a good reason. The natural increase of population demands an
increased production of grain, whilstthe primitive methods of cultiva-
tion rapidly exhaust the soil and diminish its productivity. Thus
the ordinary course of life increases the demand for grain, and at the
same time diminishes the supply. With regard to this stage of
economic development the modest assertion of Malthus, that the
supply of food does not increase so rapidly as the ])opulation, falls far
short of the truth. The population increases whilst the supply of
food decreases, not only relatively but absolutely.

When a people reaches this point in its economic development,
it must necessarily adopt one of two expedients : cither it must
prevent the increase of population, or it must increase the produc-
tion of food. The former of these two alternatives may bo effected
in a variety of ways. A large number of the young infants may-
be exposed, or a despotic ruler may occasionally order a massacre
of the innocents, or the surplus population may emigrate to foreign
lands, as was done by the Scandinavians in the ninth century^ and
as is done by ourselves at the present day. The latter alternative
may be effected cither by extending the area of cultivation or bj’-
improving the system of agriculture.

Amidst all these various expedients the Ilusso-Slavonians had no
difSculty in choosing. Indeed, it may^ be said that their geo-
graphical position relieved them from the necessity of deliberately
making a choice. To the eastward they had a boundless* expanse
of thinly-populated virgin land, and accordingly they easily
extended the area of cultivation. This was at once the most
natural and the wisest course, for of all the possible devices for pre-
serving the equilibrium between population and food-production,
increasing the area of cultivation is the easiest and most effective.
High farming is a thing to be proud of when there is a scarcity of
land, but it would be absurd to attempt it when there happens to be
in the vicinity abundance of virgin soil. It is only when further
^extension is impossible that intensive culture is adopted.

The process of expansion thus produced by purely economic
causes was accelerated by political influences. The oppression and
exaetifll^ the authorities made many move eastward^ During

THE TEHRITOBIAL EXPANSION OF BT7SSIA.

147

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this oppression reached
its climax. The increase in the numbers of officials^ the augmenta-
tion of the taxes^ the merciless exactions of the Yoyevods and their
subordinates, the transformation of the free peasants into serfs, the
ecclesiastical reforms and consequent persecutions of the Old
[Ritualists, the frequent conscriptions and violent reforms of Peter
the Great — these and similar burdens made thousands flee and seek
a refuge in the free territory where there were no proprietors, no
Yoyevods, and no tax-gatherers. But the State, with its army of
officials and tax-gatherers, followed close on the heels of the
fugitives, and those who wished to preserve their liberty had to
udvance still further. Notwithstanding the efforts of the authorities
to retain the population in the localities actually occupied, the wave'
of colonization moved steadily onwards.

For this kind of colonisation the Russian peasant is by nature
peculiarly w'ell adapted. Peace-loving, good-natured, long-suffering,
having always at hand the soft answer which turncth away wrath,
and possessing a power of self-adaptation which we headlong, stiff-
necked Britons know nothing of, he easily makes friends with any
foreign population among whom his lot is cast. He has none of
that consciousness of personal and national superiority which so
often transforms law-respecting, liberty-loving Englishmen into
cruel tyrants when they come in contact with men of a weaker race
or a lowxr degree of civilisation. Nor has he any of that incon-
siderate proselytising zeal which makes pagans so often fail to
recognise in British Christianity the religion of love. Each nation,
he thinks, has received from God its peculiar faith, and all men
should believe and act according to the faith in which they have
been born. When he goes to settle among a foreign people, even
when his future neighbours have the reputation of being inhospit-
able and unfriendly to strangers, ho takes with him neither
revolver nor bowie knife. Ho has no intention of injuring others,
and does not see why others should do him any bodily harm. In
his diminutive, loosely-constructed four-wheeled cart, drawn by an
uncouth, shaggy pony as hardy as its master, he will start on a
journey of several hundred miles, with nothing but his hatchet, his
iron kettle, his light wooden plough, and a stock of sirnffle pro-
visions sufficient to sustain life till the first crop is raised.

The vast territory which lay open to the Russian colonist con-
sisted of two contiguous regions separated from each other by no
mountain or river, but differing widely from each other in many
respects. The northern region, comprising all the northern part of
Eastern Europe and of Asia even unto Hamtchatka, may be roughly
described as a land of forests^ intersected by many rivers, and
oontainingi numerous lakes and marshes. The southern region,

L 2

148

THE TERBITOBIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

stretching away into Central Asia, is, for the most part, what Russians
call a steppe, and Americans term a prairie — ^a flat country scantily
supplied with water, and scantily covered by vegetation. The whole
of this great territory was formerly occupied by what ethnologists
loosely call the Turanian family of mankind — ^the forest region
being thinly inhabited by Finnish tribes, who lived by hunting
and agriculture, and the steppe being held by Tartar or Turkish
tribes, who led a pastoral or nomadic life.

Each of these two regions presented peculiar inducements and
peculiar obstacles to colonisation. In the forests agriculture was
for the first settlers a very laborious operation. The modus operandi
may still bo studied by observation at the present day. In spring,
when the leaves begin to appear on the trees, a band of peasants
proceed with their hatchets to the spot fixed on for a clearing.
First the large trees are attacked, and when these have been laid
loiv, the young ones are felled likewise. Each tree is allowed to
remain as it falls, and when all have been felled, the hardy woods-
men return to their homes, and think no more about the clearing
for several months. In the autumn they return to the spot in order
to strip the fallen trees of their branches, to pick out what is fit for
building purposes, and to pile up the remainder in heaps after
taking what is required for firewood. The logs to be used for
building are dragged away as soon as the first fall of snow has made
a good slippery road, and the remainder is built up into enormous
piles, standing close to each other. In the following spring these
are stirred up with long poles and ignited. First flames appear at
various points, and then, with the aid of the drj»' grass and under-
wood, rapidly spread towards each other till they join and form a
gigantic bonfire, such as is never seen in a civilised country. If the
fire does its w'ork properly, it covers the cleared space W'ith a layer
of ashes, and when these ashes have been slightly mixed with the
underlying soil, the seed is sown, and then covered by means of a
primitive harrow composed of the branch of a pino-trfee. In the
autumn the sowers who have thus cast their bread upon the ashes
may expect their reward. In ordinary years barley or rye will
probably produce at least six or seven fold, and it is quite possible,
if the season be favourable, that as much as twenty-five or thirty
fold may be produced. Unfortunately this artificial fertility is very
short-lived. It may be exhausted in two or three years if the
natural soil be poor and stony, and even where the soil is com-
paratively good, not more than seven or eight tolerable harvests will
be obtained. On the whole, therefore, this primitive system of
It^iculture does not give a very high remuneration for the labour
expended.

Much simpler and less laborious is the system of cagriculture

THE TEHBITOBIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

149

practised on the Steppe. Here the squatter had no trees to fell, no
clearing to make. Nature had cleared the land for him and
supplied him with a rich black soil of marvellous fertility, which
centuries of cultivation has now only in part exhausted. All he had
to do was to scratch the land and throw in the seed, and he might
confidently look forr^’ard to a magnificent harvest. Why then, it
may be asked, did the Russian peasant often choose the northern
forests, where the soil was poor and could not be used without a
considerable expenditure of labour in felling the trees, when he
had, at an equal distance from his home, rich fertile land already
prepared for him by nature ? For this apparent inconsistency there
was a good and valid reason. The Russian peasants had not, even in
those good old times, any passionate love of labour for its own sake,
nor were they by any means insensible to the facilities and advantages
of the Steppe system of agriculture. Had they regarded the sub-
ject from the purely agricultural point of view, every one of them
would have preferred the southern Steppe to the northern forest.
In reality certain collateral circumstances had to be considered, and
therein lies the explanation of the phenomenon. The colonist had
to take into consideration the Fauna as well as the Flora of the
two regions. At the head of the Fauna in the northern forests
stood the peace-loving, laborious Finnish tribes, little disposed to
molest settlers who did not make themselves obnoxiously aggressive ;
on the Steppe lived the predatory nomadic hordes, ever ready to
attack, plunder, and carry off as slaves the peaceful, agricultural
population. These facts, as well as the agricultural conditions, were
perfectly well known to the Russian peasant, and he naturally took
them into consideration in determining where he should settle.
Fearless and fatalistic as he is, ho could not entirely close his eyes
to the dangers of the Steppe, and many chose rather to encounter
the hard work of the forest region.

Though the colonisation of the northern forest was not effected
without bloodshed, its general character was pacific, and it accord-
ingly received little attention from the contemporary chroniclers.
The colonisation of the Steppe, on the contrary, forms one of the
bloodiest pages of European history. From the earliest times the
great plains to the north of the Black Sea and the Caspian were
held by various nomadic hordes, and a continual border warfare
was carried on between them and the sedentary agricultural
population. “ This people,” says a contemporary Byzantine writer,
have no fixed place of abode, they seek to conquer all lands and
colonise none. They are flying people, and therefore cannot be
caught. As they have neither towns nor villages they must be
hunted like wild beasts. They can be fitly compart only to
(^Uflins, 'i^hich beneficent nature has banished to uninhabited

150

THE TEBBITOBIAL EXPANSION OP BUSSIA.

regions/’ Their raids are thus described by an old Bussian chroni-
cler : “ They bum the villages, the farmyards and the churches.
The land is turned by them into a desert, and the over-grown fields
become the lair of wild beasts. Many people are led away into
slavery ; others are tortured and killed or die from hunger and
thirst. Sad, weary, stiff from cold, with faces wan from woe, bare-
foot or naked, and tom by the thistles, the Bussian prisoners trudge
along through an unknown country, and weeping say to one
another ; ‘ I am from such a town, and I from such a village.’ ”
And in harmony with the monastic chroniclers we hear the name-
less Slavonic Ossinn wailing for the fallen sons of Bus : In the
Bussian land is rarely heard the voice of the husbandman, but often
the cry of the vultures, fighting with each other over the bodies of
slain, and the ravens scream as they fly to the spoil.”

For centuries this stmggle of agricultural colonisation with
nomadic barbarism went on with varying success. At one time the
agriculturists advance steadily ; at another they arc driven back and
the whole of Bussia becomes an Uluss or tributary state of the Mongol
Emperors ; then the movement forward recommences, and finally the
nomads are expelled or pacified. This final result has been only
very recently attained. At the middle of the last century thousands of
Bussians were still sold annually in the slave markets of the Crimea,
and the practice went on till the Crimea was annexed to the Bussian
Empire by Catherine II. Even then the kidnapping did not entirely
cease. Indeed it was still practised in our own day by the Ehan of
Ehiva and other potentates who had succeeded in maintaining their
independence. These two different kinds of colonisation naturally
produced different kinds of colonists. In the north the colonists were
all agriculturists or traders ; in the south, besides the agriculturists
and traders, was formed a peculiar hybrid class of men, half colonists
and half soldiers, known under the name of Cossacks.

I have been so often asked what a Cossack is, that I consider it
well to take this opportunity of explaining. In old times, when the
struggle above mentioned was still going on, it was necessary to
keep always a large number of light irregular troops on the southern
frontier in order to protect the sedentary 2)opulation against the
raids of the nomadic Tartars. These troops wore recruited some-
times in the usual way and sometimes by sending to the frontier the
inmates of the jails, and the name Cossack was commonly applied to
them. But these were not the Cossacks best known to history and
romance. The genuine “ free Cossacks” lived beyond the frontier
and possessed a certain military organization, which enabled them
not only to defend themselves against the Tartars but even to make
raids on Tartar territory, and repay in some measure the barbaoitios
which the Tartars committed in Bussia. Each one of (he rivers

THE TEEBITOBIAL EXPAHSIOH OF RUSSIA.

151

flowing southwards — the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, the Taik or
Ural — ^was held by a band of these free Cossacks, and no one, whether
Russian or Tartar, was allowed to pass through their territory with-
out their permission. Oflicially they were Russians, professed
•champions of Orthodoxy, and loyal subjects of the Tsar, but in reality
they were something different. Though they were Russian by
•origin, language, and sympathy, the habit of kidnapping Tartar
women introduced a certain mixture of Tartar blood. Though pro-
fessed champions of Orthodoxy, they troubled themselves very little
with religion and did not submit to the ecclesiastical authorities.
Their political status cannot be easily defined. Though they pro-
fessed allegiance and devotion to the Tsar, they did not think it
necessary to obey him, except in so far as his orders suited their own
•convenience. And the Tsar, it must be confessed, acted towards
them in a similar fashion. When the Tsar found it convenient, he
called them his faithful subjects ; and when complaints were made to
him abput their raids into Turkish territory, he declared that they
were runawaj^s and brigands, and that the Sultan might punish them
as he thought fit. At the same time, however, even when they were
declared to be brigands, they regularly received ammunition and
supplies from Moscow, as is amply proved by recently published
documents.

The most celebrated of these strange military communities were
the Cossacks of the Dnieper and the Cossacks of the Don, which
differed considerably from each other in their organization. The
former had a fortified camp on an island in the Dnieper, and here
n large number of them led a purely military life, somewhat after
the manner of the military orders in the time of the Crusades.
Each kur^n, or company, had a common table and common sleeping-
apartment, and women were strictly excluded from the fortified
iiiclosure. The latter — ^those of the Don — ^had no permanent camp
of this kind, and assembled merely as circumstances demanded.
But the two communities had much in common. Both were organ-
ized on democratic principles, and chose their officers by popular
election. Both were ever ready to make a raid on Turkish territory
with or without a pretext. Both sent forth occasionally fleets of
email boats which swept the Black Sea, devastated the coasts, and
sometimes took towns by storm, precisely as the R^ormans did in
western Europe during the ninth century.

These various Cossack communities had not all the same fate.
The Cossacks of the Dnieper were forcibly disbanded by Catherine
II., and in part transferred to the north l^nk of the Eub&a, where
for several generations, under the name of Black Sea Cossacks,
they guarded the frontier and kept up an incessant border war-
ikre with the turbulent tribes of the Caucasus. The Cossacks of

162

THS TEBRITOBIAL EXPANSION OP BU6SU.

iho Volga disappeared without leaving a trace. Those of the*
Don and the Ural were gradually transformed into irregular
troops, and they still fulfil this function at the present day. The
final results of the colonisation in the northern and southern
regions have been as different as the modes in which it was effected.
In the north, the Russians have to a great extent assimilated and
absorbed the native population ; in the south, on the contrary, the
native population has been simply held in subjection or driven out.
The explanation of this interesting fact may perhaps throw some
Bght on certain dark historical problems.

The chief obstacles to the amalgamation of two contiguous races,
living under the same government are partly economic and partly
intellectual ; in other words, the obstacles lie partly in the mode of
life, and partly in the fundamental, hereditary intellectual conceptions
or religious beliefs and observances. In the northern region the
Bussian colonists found a population in the same stage of economic
development as themselves. The Finnish tribes were already
agriculturists, and possessed a superabundance of land. They
had therefore no reasonable motive for opposing the mode of
colonisation, and the colonists could settle amongst them almost
unperccived. Thus the first step towards amalgamation was effected.

In the south, on the contrary, the native races were still pastoral
nomads, that is to say, they were in a lower stage of economic
development than the colonists, and the natural consequence of this
was a war of extermination between the two races, such as that
which has been going on for generations in America between the
Bed-skins and the white settlers. Nomadic tribes have always a
strong tendency to attack a neighbouring sedentary population.
Their love of booty urges them to make raids, especially if they“
have at their back a convenient market for the sale of slaves.
Besides this, the simple instinct of self-defence compels them to
resist the advance of the settlers, for extension of the area of
agriculture means a diminution of the pasturage and of the flocks-
There is a curious illustration of this in the history of the Don
Cossacks. When they lived by sheep-farming and pillage they
prohibited agriculture under pain of death. The prohibition is
commonly explained by a supposed desire to preserve the warlike
spirit of the community, but this explanation seems to me much too
ingenious to be true. The reason, in my opinion, was simply this i
the man who ploughed up a bit of land infringed thereby on his.
neighbours’ rights of pasturage.

!I3ie struggle between an agricultural and pastoral race may be*
long' and bloody, but the final result is never doubtful. The agri-
tnltiirista are, for reasons which I may at some future time explain,
invacriabfy the victors in the long run. The nomads must gigidually
retreat, and when further retreat becomes impossible they must

THE TEBBITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

153

change their mode of life under pain of extermination. All this
has been fully illustrated in the history of Russian colonisation.
The nomadic tribes have been forced to emigrate, or have been driven to
the outlying comers of the empire. And even there they are not left
in peace. The area of agriculture is steadily and surely widening, and
soon there will be no longer land enough to allow of purely pastoral
life. In some of the tribes I have myself witnessed the first attempts
at tilling the soil.

Even if these Tartar tribes had been agriculturists they would not
have amalgamated with the ever-advancing Russian colonists, for
there was another and equally serious obstacle to amalgamation : the
Russians were Christians and the Tartars were Mahometans. Any
one who has lived on friendly terms with Mahometans, must have
noticed that they are utterly inaccessible to the influence of Christi-
anity. They are proud of their Mahometanism, and look down upon
Christians as Polytheists. ‘‘We have,^' they say, “but one God,
and Mahomet is his prophet. You too believe in God, and you had
a great prophet in Christ, whom we also respect, but you deified
your prophet, and you added a third God, we know not whence.
You say that your prophet is the equal of Allah. Far from us be
such blasphemy ! ” The truth is that Mahometanism is, like
Christianity itself, a monotheistic religion possessing a doctrinal
theology and an organized priesthood. Any religion which possesses
those requisites is pretty certain to withstand the proselytizing
tendencies of other faiths. This may perhaps be best illustrated by
explaining how the Finnish tribes, who did not possess a religion of
this kind, were imperceptibly Christianized.

The old Finnish religions, if we may judge of them by the frag-
ments which still exist, had like the people themselves, a thoroughly
practical, prosaic character. The theology consisted not of abstract
dogmas logically co-ordinated and subordinated, but of simple pre-
scriptions for insuring material well-being. At the present day,
in the districts which have not yet been Russified, the prayers are
merely plain, unadorned requests for a good harvest, plenty of
cattle, and the like. Some of the worshippers — at least, among the
Tcheremiss — ^have, since falling under Russian domination, acquired
the habit of adding a petition for money to pay their taxes. The
ceremonies usually employed are, for the most part magical rites,
which are supposed to avert the influence of malicious spirits. The
Tchuvash use, besides these, certain ceremonies for the purpose of
freeing themselves from the unwelcome visits of their departed rela-
tives, and here the practical, common-sense character of the people *
comes out in a striking way. Instead of. indulging in mystic rites,
they simply place near the graves a plentiful supply of food, and
pious sojils believe that this is eaten during the night, not by the
village dogs, but by the famished spirits. This is, be it parenthdar

154

THE TEEBITOBIAL EXPANSION OF EUSSIA.

cally remarked, a more humane way of laying ghosts than the
habit of erecting tombstones — custom which, perhaps, had originally
the same intention.

Such a religion presented no obstacle to the gradual reception of
Christianity — especially the Christianity of the Greek Orthodox
Church. If Yumala and the other good deities did not send plenti-
ful harvests, it was surely prudent to ask the additional help of the
Madonna or the Russian God.” If the ordinary magic rites and
incantations did not suffice for warding off the pernicious influence
-of evil spirits, why not adopt the custom of making the sign of the
cross, which the Russians use effectually in moments of danger ?
Even formal admission into the Church by the Sacrament of baptism
did not awaken any resistance or fanaticism in their simple minds —
at least during the summer months. The religious significance of
the ceremony entirely escaped them, and they must have had great
difficulty in explaining to themselves why the Russian authorities
should reward them with a shirt and a rouble for simply submitting
to be bathed. Many of them, however, did not trouble themselves
with such abstruse questions, and presented themselves a second and a
third time in view of the promised reward. Sometimes the mis-
sionary work was undertaken by men imbued with the true missionary
spirit, and in these cases an attempt was made to convey a certain
amoxmt of religious instruction; but more frequently it was entrusted
to ecclesiastical officials or officers of rural police, who merely counted
the number of the converts.

This simple-minded, religious eclecticism produced the most singu-
lar mixtures of Christianity and Paganism. At the harvest festival
Tchuvash peasants have been known to pray first to their old deities
and afterwards to the Russian God ”, and the God Nicholas ” —
Nicholas, the miracle- worker, being the favourite saint of the Russian
peasantry. Sometimes the Yomzy — half-magicians, half-priests —
recommend their believers to try the effect of a prayer to the
Christian deities, in wliich case the invocation may bo cOUched in
some such familiar terms as the following : Look here, O Nicholas-
God. Perhaps my neighbour, little Michael, has been slandering
me to you, or perhaps he will do so. If so, don’t listen to him. I
have done him no ill and wish him none. He himself is a worth-
less boaster and a babbler, and does not really honour you, but merely
plays the hypocrite. I, on the contrary, honour you, and, behold, I
place a taper before you.” Occasionally the mixture of the two
religions is* of a still more wonderful kind. I know of one case, for
instsoice, where a Tcheremiss, in consequence of a serious illness,
8l|fifjficed a young foal to Our Lady of Kazan !

!niese few facts, which might be indefinitely multiplied, will be
sufficieQt to show how Greek Orthodoxy glided gradually ^to the
Finnish tribes without producing any intellectual revolution in the

THE TERRITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

155

minds of the converts. And Ghreek Orthodoxy, it must be re-
membered, is in this matter equivalent to Russian nationality.
Ooromunity of religion leads naturally to intermarriage, and inter-
marriage to the complete blending of the two nationalities. In very
many villages in the northern half of Russia, it is impossible to say
whether the inhabitants are Finnish or Slavonic. This process of
Russification could not take place among the Mahometans, who have
a doctrinal religion and a regularly organized priesthood. Even
those Mahometans who are agriculturists and settled in villages,
have remained unaffected by Russian influence. I know villages
where one-half of the i^opulation is Christian and the other half is
Mahometan, and in all of them the two races have remained per-
fectly separate. It must not be supposed, however, that they live at
enmity with each other. Though they live apart, each race pre-
serving scrupulously its own faith and customs, they are inspired
with no aggressive fanaticism, and co-operate in all communal
matters as if no difiercnce of race or religion existed between them.
Sometimes they elect as village-elder a Christian, sometimes a
Mahometan, and the village assembly never thinks of raising re-
ligious questions. I know of one instance in the Province of Samara,
where the Mahometan peasants voluntarily assisted their Christian
fellow- villagers in transporting wood for repairing the parish church.
Thus, we see, under a tolerably good administration Mahometan
Tartars and Christian Slavs can live peaceably together in the same
village community.

I have hitherto represented this eastward expansion of Russia as
a purely spontaneous movement of the agricultural population. This
is a true but at the same time an imperfect representation of the
phenomenon. Though the initiative unquestionably came from the
people, urged on by economic wants, the Government played an
important part in the movement. In early times, when Russia was
merely a conglomeration of independent principalities, the princes
were all under a moral and poUtical obligation to protect their
subjects, and when the Grand Princes of Moscow in the fifteenth
century united the numerous principalities under their own sceptre
and proclaimed themselves Tsars, this obligation devolved upon
them. In the north the obligation was easily fulfilled. A few
military stations, separated at great distances from each other,
sufficed to maintain order, and even those after a certain time ceased
to bo necessary. In the south, on the contrary, the task was one of
great difficulty. There the agricultural population had to be pro-
tected along a frontier of enormous length, lying open at all points
to the incursions of nomadic tribes. It was not enough to keep up
a militery cordon to prevent the raids of small marauding parties.
The nomads often came in enormous hordes which could be success-

156

THE TEEMTOMAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

fully resisted only by large armies. And sometimes the whole
military strength of the country was insufficient to resist the invaders.
Again and again during the thirteenth and fourteenth century Tartar
hordes swept over the country, burning the towns and villages —
Kief and Moscow among the number — ^and spreading devastation
wherever they appeared. For more than two centuries tho whole
country formed part of the Mongol Empire, and had to pay a heavy
yearly tribute to the Khan. Under these circumstances the Govern-
ment could not remain inactive. It had not only to protect its subjects,
but also to maintain its political independence ; and those objects
could only be attained by constantly pushing forv’ard the frontier.

At the present time our public seem unable to understand why
the Russian frontier should be continually moved forward, and
habitually attribute the fact to Russia’s insatiable desire for territorial
aggrandisement. They appear to imagine that the Tsar might any
morning say to his minister, ‘^Thus far shalt thou go, and no
further ; ” and that all difficulties would be thereby satisfactorily
solved. This view' is not likely to be held by any one who has lived
near a frontier such as that w’hich Russia formerly possessed in
Europe, and still possesses in Central Asia. To protect effectually
such a frontier without interfering in any W’ay with those W’ho live
immediately beyond it, one of two expedients must be adopted : either
a great wall must be built, or military colonies must be planted at
short distances apart, and military patrols constantly kept up
between them. The former of these expedients, though adapted
wdth some success by the Romans in Britain, and by the Chinese on
their north-western frontier, is of course not to be thought of. The
latter, which was adopted by Russia against the Circassians and
other marauding tribes of the Caucasus, is scarcely more feasible.
This military line, stretching from the Sea of Azof to the
Caspian, W’^as comparatively short, and ran through a well-watered
and extremely fertile country ; and yet it demanded an enormous
expenditure of men and money and w'as only very partially effectual.
In spite of all precautions, bands of marauders broke through the
lines and too often returned unpunished and laden with booty.
After many years of experience the Russians found that the only
way of preventing those incursions was to settle the marauding
tribes in villages over which a strict supervision could bo exercised.
If this system of military colonies thus proved enormously expensive
and very ineffectual in the country to the north of the Caucasus, we
can eaedly imagine how difficult it would be to realise it fully in
Central Asia, where tho frontier is incomparably longer and in many
parts utterly unfit for agricultural colonisation. Nomadic tribes can
be made to keep peace only when they know that they may be
attacked fuad punished on their own territory, and that there ^s no
ai^um to which they can flee.

THE TEBBITOBIAL EXPANSION OP RUSSIA.

167

From all this it is evident that the idea of a neutral zone between
the Russian and British frontiers in Asia is an absurdity, fit only to
amuse diplomatists, and unworthy of being entertained by practical
statesmen, unless indeed it were possible to find a broad uninhabited
zone which would servo the same purpose as the Ghreat Wall of
China. If it be habitable, it will inevitably become an asylum for
all the robbers and lawless spirits within a radius of many hundred
miles, and no civilised power can reasonably be expected to accept
such neighbours. If such a zone had been established, Russia might
justly have spoken to England in this fashion : I object to have
at my door this refuge for rascality. Either you must preserve
order amongst tlie inmates, or allow me to do so.’'

“AVhcre then,” asks the alarmed Russophobist, '^is Russian aggres-
sion to stop ? Must we allow her to push her frontier forward to our
own, and thus expose ourselves to all those conflicts which inevitably
arise between nations that possess contiguous territory ? ” To this I
reply, that Russia must push forward her frontier until she reaches
a country possessing a Government which is able and willing to
keep order within its borders, and to prevent its subjects from com-
mitting depredations on their neighbours. As none of the petty
states of Centi'al Asia seems capable of permanently fulfilling this
eondition, it is pretty certain that the Russian and British frontiers
will one day meet. Where they will meet depends upon ourselves.
If we do not wish her to overstep a certain line, we must ourselves
advance to that line. As to the complications which inevitably
arise between contiguous nations, I think they are fewer and less
dangerous than those which arise between nations separated by a
small state incapable of making its neutrality respected, and kept
alive simply by the mutual jealousy of its neighbours. Germany
does not periodically go to war with Holland or Russia, though
•separated from them by a mere artificial frontier ; and France has
never been prevented from going to war with Austria, though
separated from her by a broad intervening territory. The old
theory that the great powers may be prevented from going to war
by interposing small independent states between them, is long since
exploded ; and even if it were true, it would be inapplicable in the
case under consideration, for there is nothing worthy to be called a
state between Russian territory and British India.

In consequence of the active part which the Government has thus
taken in the extension of the territory, it has frequently happened
that the process of political expansion got greatly ahead of the
colonisation. After the Turkish wars and consequent annexations
in the time of Catherine II., a great part of southern Russia was
almost uninhabited, and the deficiency of population had' to be
co]^^ted by organized emigration. The Russian diplomatic agents
in Western Europe were ordered to use all possible ^orts to induoe

168

THE XEBBITOBLiL EXPAHSIOH OF BUSSIA.

artizans and peasants to emigrate to Russia, and special agents were
sent to ranoua countries for the same purpose. Thousands accepted
the invitation, and were for the most part settled on the territory
which had formerly been the pasture-ground of the nomadic
hordes. This policy was adopted by succeeding sovereigns, and has.
been continued in an inte/mittent fashion down to the present time.
The emigrants thus collected, together with the other inhabitants,,
now form an ethnographical conglomeration such as is to be found
nowhere else in the Old World. The official statistics of New
Russia alone — that is to say the Provinces of EkatcrinoslafE, Tauride^
Kherson and Bessarabia, enumerate the following nationalities : —
Ghreat Russians, Little Russians, Poles, Servians, Montenegrins,
Bulgarians, Moldavians, Germans, Swedes, Swiss, Frencli, Italians,
Greeks, Armenians, Tartars, Mordva, Jews, and Gypsies. The rcK-
gions are almost equally numerous. The statistics speak of Greek
Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Gregorians, Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anglicans, Menonites, Separatists, Pietists, KaraYm Jews, Talmud-
ists, Mahometans, and numerous purely Russian sects such as the
Molokani and the Skoptsi. America herself could scarcely show a
more motley list in her statistics of population ; it must, however,
be admitted, that the above enumeration does not convey a correct
idea of the actual population. The great body of the population ia
Russian and Orthodox, whilst many of the nationalities arc repre-
sented only by a small number of souls. Of the colonists of foreign
nationality, by far the most numerous and prosperous are the
German Menonites, and by far the least prosperous arc the Jews.
Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between a Menonito
and a Jewish colony. In the former we find large, well-built
houses, well-stocked gardens, fine strong horses, fat cattle, agricultural
implements adapted to the local conditions, and there is in general
an air of prosperity, comfort, and contentment ; in the latter we are
too often reminded of the abomination of desolation spoken of by
Daniel the Prophet. The other colonists must be placed between
these two extremes. The ordinary Germans and the Bulgarians
approach the former type, whilst the Tartar-speaking Greeks
approach more nearly to the latter.

As Scandinavia was formerly called officina gentium — a foundry in
which new nations were cast — ^so wc may call Southern Russia a
crucible in which the fragments of old nations are being melted down
so as to form a new and composite whole. The melting, however,
proceeds slowly. If I may judge from my own observation I should
say that national peculiarities are not obliterated so rapidly in Russia
as in America or in British colonies; In America, for instance, I
have often seen Germans who had been but a short time in the
country, tiying hard to be more American than the nativef, but
among the Gennan colonists in Russia I have never witnessed any-

THE TEERITOMAL EXPANSION OF BUSBU.

thing of the kind. Though their fathers and grandfathers may have
been born in the country, they look down on the Hussian peasants,
fear the officials, preserve jealously their own language, rarely or
never speak Bussian well, and intermarry among themselves. The
Bussian influence acts more rapidly, however, on the Slavonic
colonists — Servians, Bulgarians, Montenegrins — who profess the
Greek Orthodox faith, learn more easily the Bussian language,
have no consciousness of belonging to a Culturvolk, and in general
possess a nature much more pliable than the Teutonic.

In the Asiatic part of Bussia, where the frontier has always been
pushed forward more easily and more rapidly than in Europe, there
are still at the present day vast territories almost entirely uninhabited.
Some of these arc by tlio nature of their soil and climate unfitted for
agriculture in its primitive forms, and could not be made available
without the expenditure of enormous sums for irrigation ; others are
well adapted for agriculture and are already being colonised. On
the whole, the Bussians have in this part of the empire much more
land than they con posi ibly utilise, and the possession of it must for
a long time to come bo a serious burden on the national exchequer.

If we turn now from the East to the West we shall find that the
expansion in this direction was of an entirely different kind. The
country lying to the west of the early Busso-Slavonian settlements
had a poor soil and a comparatively dense population, and conse-
quently held out no inducements to emigration. Besides this, it was
inhabited by warlike agricultural races, who not only were capable
of defending their own territory, but were strongly disposed to make
encroachments on their eastern neighbours. Bussian expansion to
the westward was, therefore, not at all a spontaneous movement of the
agricultural population. The annexed provinces are still inhabited
by foreign races, and still by no means socially Bussianized. Poland,
Lithuania, the Baltic provinces, and Finland are Bussian merely in
the political sense of the term, and their annexation was effected by
diplomacy based on military force. It must, however, be admitted
that if national self-preservation forms a valid plea for aggressive
conquest, Bussian expansion in this direction has a certain historical
justification.

JSo sooner had Bussia freed herself in the fifteenth century from
the Tartar yoke than her political independence, and even her
national existence, wore threatened from the west. Her western
neighbours were, like herself, animated by that national tendency
to expansion which I have above described, and for a time it seemed
doubtful who should ultimately possess that vast level tract of
country which is now known as the Bussian Empire. The two chief
competitors in the sixteenth century were the Tsars of Muscovy on
the one j^and, and the Swings of Poland and Idthuaiua on the other.
For some time the latter seemed to have the better chance. In close
^tterims Jallerlahna Public Ltbrcr*

v;

160

THB TEMalOBIAL EXPANSION OF KUSSIA.

relatioiiB with Western Europe^ they had been able to adopt many of
the improvements which had been recently made in the art of war,
and with the help of the free Cossacks of the South they succeeded in
over-running the country. But when they attempted to accomplish
their purpose in a too hasty and reckless fashion, they raised a storm
of popular fanaticism which ultimately drove them out. Still the
country was in a very precarious position, and its more intellig|ent
rulers perceived plainly that, in order to carry on the struggle suc-
cessfully, they must import something of that Western civilisation
which gave such an advantage to their opponents. This was, how-
ever, no easy matter, for they had no direct easy channel of com-
munication with the West. In the year 1563 an English navigator,
whilst seeking for a short route to China and India, had accidentally
discovered the port of Arkangel on the White Sea, and since that
time the Tsars had kept up an intermittent diplomatic and commer-
cial intercourse with England. But this route was at all times
tedious and dangerous, and during a great part of the year it was
completely closed. All attempts to import “cunning foreign
artificers * ** by way of the Baltic were frustrated by the Livonian
order who at that time held the East coast, and who considered, like
certain people on the coast of Africa at the present day, that the
barbarous natives of the interior ought not to be supplied with arms
and ammunition. Under these circumstances, the possession of the
Baltic coast naturally became a prime object of Bussian ambition.

For the possession of tliis prize there were other two competitors,
Poland and Sweden. Kussia was inferior to these rivals in the art of
war, but she had one immense advantage over them. Whilst they
were tom and weakened by political factions, she possessed a strong,
stable government, and could easily concentrate her efibrts for a
definite purpose. All that she needed was an army on the Euro-
pean model. Peter the Great created such an army and won the
prize. After this the political disintegration of Poland proceeded
still more rapidly, and when that unhappy country "was broken in
pieces Bussia naturally took for herself the lion’s share of the spoil.

The following table shows the rapid expansion of Bussia from the
time when Ivan III. united the independent principalities and
threw off the Tartar yoke, down to the accession of Peter the Great,
in 1682

^ In 1505 the Tsardom of Muscovy contained about 37,000 square miles

1533

»»

>•

47,000

1584

125,000

1598

157.000

257.000

1676

1682

265,000

* Of these 265,000 square miles about 80,000 were in Europe, and

about 185,000 in Asia. Peter the Great, though famous as a

THE TEBBITOBIAL EXPANSION OF HT76S1A.

161

conqueror, did not annex nearly so mud territory as many of liis
predecessors and successors. At his death, in 1725, the empire con-
tained, in round numbers, 82,000 square miles in Europe, and
193,000 in Asia. The following table shows the further expansion : —

jji jiiuivim tuiu buu

Caucasus.

In Asia.

82,000 sqr. miles

193,000 sq. miles

1770

84,000

210,000

1800

95,000 „

210,000 „

1825

105,000

210,000 „

1855

106,663 „

245,000 „

1867

106,951

248,470

In this table is not included the territory in the north-west of
America — containing about 24,210 square miles — which was annexed
to Eussia in 1799, and ceded to the United States in 1867. Regard-
ing the amount of territory acquired by Russia in Central Asia
since 1867, I do not at present possess any statistical data.

When once Russia has laid hold of territory she docs not readily
relax her grasp. She has, however, since the death of Peter the
Great, on four occasions ceded territory which she had formerly
annexed. In 1729 she ceded Mazanderan and Astcrabad to Persia ;
in 1735 she ceded to the same power that part of the Caucasus which
lies to the south of Terek ; in 1856, by the treaty of Paris, she gave
up the mouths of the Danube and part of Bessarabia; and in
1867 she sold to the United States her American possessions.

So much for the past. Let us now consider the probable future
expansion — a subject that has a peculiar interest at the present time.
It will be well to begin with the simpler, and proceed gradually to the
more difficult, parts of the problem.

Towards the west and the north Russia has neither the ability nor
the desire to push forward her actual frontiers. Towards the north
expansion is physically impossible until new habitable lands in the
Polar regions bo discovered, and westward expansion is almost as
imlikely. By the conquest of Finland in 1809, Russia obtained
what may be called her natural frontier on the north-west, and it is
scarcely conceivable that she should desire to annex any part of
northern Scandinavia. In the direction of Germany conquest is
neither desirable nor possible. Russia cannot desire to have a
disaffected German population on her western frontier, and if she did
desire it, she could not realise her wish, for Germany is strong
enough to defend her own territory.

Towards the east and south-east the problem is by no means so
simple. The recent sale of the American territory may be token as
a conclusive proof that Russia has wisely determined , to remain on

VOL. XX. N.S. M

162

THE TEEEITOEIAL EXPANSION OP EUSSIA.

this side of Behring’s Strdits ; and though she may covet certain
islands of the Japanese group, there is little chance of her obtaining
them. She has, it is true, recently annexed Sagalicn — or more
properly Sakhalin — ^which lies near the Amoor territory, and
formerly belonged to Japan; but this acquisition, except for the
purpose of a penal settlement, is a burden rather than an advantage,
and any further advance in this direction can be easily stopped.
Encroachments on the Chinese Empire could not be so easily pre-
vented. How and when they will be made, must depend to a
great extent on the Chinese Government. Hussia already possesses
near the Chinese frontier far more territory than she can possibly
utilise for man}’’ years to come, and, therefore, she has no inducement
to annex new land in this region, provided the Chinese prevent their
subjects from committing dojircdations. It may happen, however,
that China w’ill bo unable to fulfil her police duties towards her
neighbours, and in thaii ease it is not at all unlikely that Bussia may
find annexation loss expensive than the maintenance of a strong
military cordon. When land is required for agricultural colonisa-
tion, the tendency to encroach is always, cwtvrk pnrihusiy in the
inverse ratio to the density of i)opulation, for where the inhabitants
are scarce, the land is more plentiful and less exhausted by cultiva-
tion. Whore, on the contrary, land is not required for cultivation,
as on the Chinese frontier, the temptation to annex new territory is
always directly proportionate to the density of population. An
uninhabited territory not required for colonisation is simidy a burden,
for it necessitates expenditoi’e and gives no revenue; whereas a
territory with a tolerably dense population furnishes new tax-payers
and new markets for the national industry, and thereby compensates,
'Or more than compensates, for the expenses of administration. If
the vague accounts of the inordinate density of population in China
be correct, Bussia has less reason to restrain her expansive tendency
in that direction.

With regard to the new markets for the national industly, it may
be well to insert here a few words. Russia aspires to become, not
only the greatest of military powers, but also a great industrial and
commercial nation, and she firmly believps that by means of her
great natural resources and the enterprising character of her people,
she will succeed in rcalisuig this aspiration. Herein lies a perma-
nent source of enmity towards England. England is at the present
time like a great manufacturer who has outstripped his rivals, and
has awakened in the breasts of many of them a considerable amount
of jealousy and hatred. By means of her ruthless politique
d’exploitation,” it is said, she has become the great blood-sucker of
all less advanced nations. Fearing no competition, we preach the
invidious principles of free trade, and deluge foreign countries with

THE TERRITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

163

our manufactures to sucli an extent that native industries are inevit-
ably overwhelmed, unless saved by the beneficent power of pro-
tective tariffs. In short, foreign nations in general — and some of
our own colonies in the number — ^have adopted, in no friendly spirit,
the theory quaintly expressed by the old poet, "Waller : —

Gold, thougli tho heaviest metal, hither swims ;

Ours is the harvest where the Indians mow.

Wo plough tho deep, and reap where others sow ! ”

In no countiy arc these ideas more frequently expressed than in
Russia. As revolutionary politicians when in opposition system-
atically attack all restrictions on the liberty of the press, and
systematically adopt these restrictions for their own benefit as soon
as they come into power, so the Russians habitually assail with
impassioned rhetoric our commercial and industrial supremacy, and
at. the same time habitually seek to emulate it. The means they
employ, however, are different from ours. Knowing that free com-
petition and “ the ridiculous principles of free trade ” would inevit-
ably lead to defeat in the struggle, they raise, wherever their
dominion extends, a strong barrier of protective tariffs. In this
way they protect their newly-adopted subjects from the heartless
exploitation ’’ of England, and consign them to the tender
mercies of the manufacturers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. By a
mysterious logical ijroccss, which foreigners — ^and also, it must be
added, many intelligent Russians — are unable to understand, it is
satisfactorily proved that the economic influence of Moscow, which
sells dear, is infinitely less baneful and burdensome for the native
populations than that of Manchester, which sells cheap !

Whatever we may think of tliis logical process, it is quite certain
that Russia will not abolish her protective tariff*, and therefore we
must take into consideration her zeal to support commercial interests,
in endeavouring to estimate her expansive tendencies. As her
industry is still insufficient to supply her actual wants, she will
certainly not, for the present at least, annex new territory for the
simple purpose of obtaining new markets; but even at present,
whenever she happens to have other reasons for widening her
borders, the idea of acquiring new markets may act as a subsidiary
incentive. We saw lately an instance of this in the Khiva expedi-
tion. If the Khan had conscientiously fulfilled his international
obligations, the expedition would not have been undertaken; but
when the expedition was successfiil, certain clauses in the conven-
tion showed that Russia was not unmindful of her commercial
interests. Wherever the Russian frontier advances, the possible
area of British commerce will be diminished, and the advance of the
frontier ii the direction of India depends, as I have already

M 2

164

THE TEKEITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

explained, on ourselves. Sooner or later the Eussian custom-
houses, with their protective tariffs, will be within gun-shot of
our sentries.

Proceeding westward from Afghanistan, we come to a district
where Eussian aggression is perhaps more imminent than is com-
monly supposed : I mean the northern provinces of Persia. Eussia
already holds undisputed sway on the Caspian, and might easily
appropriate any part of the territory near the coast. As I am not
aware, however, that she has at present any particular reason for
extending her dominion in this direction, wo may at once pass to
the region towards which the eyes of Europe are at this moment
directed.

The aggressive tendencies of the Eussians in the direction of
Constantinople are nearly as old as the Eussian nationality, and
much older than the Eussian Empire. The Eusso Slavonians, who
held the valley of the Dnieper from the ninth to the thirteenth
centuiy, were one of those numerous border tribes which the
decrepit Byzantine Empire attempted to ward off by diplomacy
and rich gifts, and by giving daughters of the Imperial family as
brides to the troublesome chiefs, on condition of accepting Christi-
anity. Vladimir, Prince of Kief, accepted Christianity in this way,
and his subjects followed his example. Eussia thus became eccle-
siastically a part of the Byzantine Patriarchate, and the people-
learned to regard Tsargrad — as the Imperial city is still called by
the peasantry — ^^vith peculiar veneration.

In the fifteenth century, the relative positions of Constantinople and
Moscow were changed. Constantinople fell under the power of the
Turks, whilst Moscow threw oflf the yoke of the Tartars. The Grand
Prince of Moscow and of all Eussia thereby became the chief pro-
tector of the Greek Orthodox Cliurch, and in some sort successor to
the Byzantine Tsars. To strengthen this claim, he married a
member of the old Imperial family, and his grandson went a step
further in the same direction by assuming the title of Tsar and
inventing a fable about Eurik, the founder of the Eussian dynasty,
being a descendant of Cmsar Augustus.

All this would seem to a lawyer a very shadowy title, and it must
be added that none of the Eussian monarchs — except perhaps Catherine
II., who formed the fantastic project of resuscitating the Byzantine
Empire, and caused one of her grandsons to learn modern Greek in
view of the high destiny that awaited him — ever seriously thought
of claiming the imaginary heritage ; but the idea that the Tsar may
fiome day take Tsargrad and drive out the infidel ursuper, has
become deeply rooted in the minds of the common people. As soon
as disturbances break out in the East, the Eussian peasantry begin
to think that perhaps the time has come when a crusade will be

THE TEERITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA.

m

undertaken for the recovery of the Holy City on the Bosphorus, and
for the liberation of their brethren in the faith who now groan
under Turkish bondage. I do not at all mean to imply that such a
crusade is desired. The Russian peasant’s desires arc generally
confined to the sphere of his material interests, and he strongly
dislikes all war, unless he hopes thereby to acquire new fertile land,
because it takes him away from his peaceful occupations. Still, if
he found that a crusade was undertaken and that he could not easily
avoid the conscription, it would be easy to awaken in him a certain
amount of enthusiasm. As to the bands of Russian volunteers of
which wc at present hear so much, I venture to predict that, if they
ever acquire an objective existence, they will contain very few
peasants. The conceptions, sympathies, and aspirations of the
educated classes are of a different kind and derived from a different
Gource.

After the fall of the first Napoleonic Empire, a violent popular reac-
tion took place all over Europe in favour of national independence and
republican institutions ; and the discoveries of comparative philolo-
gists, together with other influences, suggested to political theorists
certain grand confederations of peoples founded on ethnological
distinctions. All the existing ijolitical units would, it was thought,
group themselves into three categories, the Romanic, the Teutonic,
and the Slavonic ; and the principle of political federation, whilst
satisfying the demands of ethnology, would leave to the individual
nations a sufficient amount of local autonomy. I have already made
too large demands on the reader’s patience to enter hero on a de-
scription of the development of these ideas and of their influence in
Russia. Suffice it to say that they supplied to the Russian educated
classes new motives for sympathy with the Slavonic populations of
Turkey and Austria, already bound to them by community of
religion.

Wg must bear these facts in mind, if we would understand the
present state of public opinion in Russia. Englishmen are too prone
to suppose that Russian sympathy with the Slavs is merely a thinly
disguised desire to gain possession of Constantinople. This supposi-
tion is not only uncharitable but unjust. The recent accounts of
Turkish atrocities have awakened in Russia, as amongst ourselves,
genuine feelings of indignation against the oppressors, and sym-
pathy with the oppressed ; and in Russia these reports have fallen
>on much more inflammable material. Russians know much better
than wo do the oppressive character of ordinary Turkish misrule,
and they have at the same time religious and political sympathies
with the Slavs, which wo do not possess and can with difficulty
comprehend. The acquisition of Constantinople is generally regarded
by Russians as simply a possible contingency of the distant future.

166

THE TEBEITORIAL EXPANSION OF EUSSIA.

and tliis possibility has little or nothing to do with the present
excited state of public opinion.

Still it must be admitted that this excitement, whatever be the
real cause of it, actually exists, and may produce armed interven-
tion, which might possibly lead to annexation of territory. But
the policy of the Government depends entirely on the Tsar’s
personal decision. Now what is his personal decision likely to
beP As a Russian surrounded by Russians, ho naturally sym-
pathises with the Slavs, and as Tsar ho must desire to retain their
- sympathy and good-will ; but all we know about his personal
character militates against the supposition that he will endea-
vour to take the matter into his own hands and cut the difficulty
with the sword. Of a naturally pacific disposition, ho is free
from all military ambition. His phlegmatic temperament, and his
strong, sober common sense, i*cndcr him impervious to the seductive
suggestions of Paiislavists and other political dreamers. Even if
his ambition were much greater than it is, it would be amply satis-
fied by the important part wliich he lias already played in the
history of his country. In the course of a few years he emancipated
forty millions of serfs, reformed the imperial administration, created
a new system of local self-government, covered the country with a
vast network of railways, replaced the old rotten judicial organiza-
tion by now courts with public procedure, and effected many other
valuable refoims. These great enterprises have been on the whole
successful, but there has been enough of failure to dispel many
youthful illusions, and to teach the important lesson that a Tsar,
though ho may be autocratic, is not omnipotent even within the
limits of his own empire.

As to distant future possibilities it would be hazardous to specu-
late. A’’ery many Russians firmly believe that the natural and irre-
sistible course of events will sooner or later transform the Black Sea
into a Rusdan lake, and perhaps some future Tsar may attempt to
realise at once what is supposed to be the will of Fate. '‘For the
present, however — though Russia would very much like to hold the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and would certainly not allow any
strong power to take possession of this outlet to the Mediterranean —
there is, I believe, no desire cither in the people or in the Govern-
ment to accelerate by war the so-called natural course of events.
Alexander II. has already done much in the interests of i)cace, and
shows no signs of changing his policy. Perhaps Great Britain
would play more effectually her part of peacemaker, if her states-
men Would, without relaxing their vigilance, think a little less about
petty diplomatic triumphs, and show a little more confidence in the
pacifio intentions of the Tsar.

D. Mackenzie Wav-lace.

KOBESPIERRE.

A French writer* has recently published a careful and interesting
volume on J)ho famous events which ended in the overthrow of
ilobespierre and the close of the Reign of Terror.^ These events
are known in the historic calendar as the Revolution of Thermi-
dor in the Year II. After the fall of the monarchy, the Con-
vention decided that the year should begin with the autumnal
equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the birth of
the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792 ; the
Year II. opens on the same day of 179^3. The month of Thermidor
begins on July 19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore
corresponds to July 27, 1794. This lias commonly been taken as
the date of the commencement of a counter-revolution, and in one
sense it was so. Comte, however, and others have preferred to
fix tlie reaction at the execution of Danton (Ai>ril 5, 1794), or
Robespierre’s official proclamation of deism in the Festival of the
Supreme Being (May 7, 1794).

M. D’llericault does not belong to the school of writers who treat
the course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced
line, and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French
Revolution has nearly always boon handled in this way, alike by
those who think it fruitful in blessings, and their adversaries who
pronounce it a curse inflicted by the wrath of heaven. Historians
have looked at the Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea.
To the landsman tho ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood,
obeying a simple law of ebb and flow, and offering to the navigator
a single uniform force. Yet in truth we know that the oceanic
movement is the product of many forces ; the seeming uniformity
covers the energy of a hundred currents and counter-currents ; tho
sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject to untold conditions
of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one mass, but many
masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is the same
with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing
them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to
an immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for
mankind, can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its
beneficent results untempered by any mixture of evil, can only bo
maintained by men as mad as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess
Corinna said to the youthful Pindar, when he had interwoyen all the
gods and goddesses in the Theban mythology into a single hynoB,
(!)•<' La volution de Thennidor,” par Gh. D’Hezicault. I^aris : Didier.

168

BOBESPIERBE.

that we BHould bow with the hand and not with the sack. Corinna’s
monition to the singer is proper to tho interpreter of historical truth :
he should cull with the hand and not sweep in with the scythe. It
is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from the widest conception of
the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite, and stable idea of
the meaning in the history of human progress of such vast groups of
events as the Reformation or the Revolution is indispenijable for any
one to whom history is a serious study of society. It is just as
important, however, not to forget that they were really groups of
events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The
World- Epos is after all only a file of tho morning paper in a state
of glorification. A sensible man learns, when he is old enough,
to abstain from praising and blaming character by wholesale ; ho
becomes content to say of this trait that it is good, and of that act
that it was bad. So in history, we become unwilling to join or to
admire those who insist upon transferring their sentiment upon
the whole to their judgment upon each part. We seek to be allowed
to retain a decided opinion as to the final value to mankind of a long
series of transactions, and ye< not to commit ourselves to set the
same estimate on each transaction in particular, still less on each
person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the general
results of the Reformation without being obliged to defend John of
Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists ?

M. D’Hdricault’s volume naturally suggests such reflections as
these. Of all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered
most from the audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic
impatience of others. Louis Blanc and M. lirnest Hamel talk of
him as an angel or a prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day
indeed in their martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat
him as a mixture of Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan
and a miscreant. We are reminded of the commencement of an
address of the French Senate to the first Bonaparte : “ Sire,” they
began, tho desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that
can afflict the human mind.” This bold aphorism touches one of
the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men and events. It
is because people so irrationally think fit to insist upon perfection,
that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he ever had a
fault; and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable standard makes
it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny that he had a
single virtue or performed a single scr^dee. The point of view is essen-
tially unfit for history. The real subject of history is the improvemoRt
of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in public affairs since
the world began saw the true direction of improvement with an
absolutely unerring eye from tho beginning of his career to the end.
fl. ifi folly for the historian, as it is for the statesman, to strain after

BOBESPIEBBE.

169

the imaginative unity of the dramatic creator. Social progress is an
amir of many small pieces and slow accretions, and the interest of
historic study lies in tracing amid the immense turmoil of events
and through the confusion of voices the devious course of the sacred
torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer. And it is not the bearers
who am most interesting, but the torch.

In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history
of the fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous
in the industrial history of the middle ages for its pre-eminence in
the manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings,
Maximilian Robespierre was born in May 1759. lie was therefore
no more than five and thirty years old, when he came to his ghastly
end in 1794. Ilis father was a law}^cr, and though the surname of
the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle
class. When this decorative j^refix became dangerous, Maximilian
Derobespierro dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent
or less fortunate ; one of the charges made against him was that he
had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton.

Robespierre’s youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His
mother died when ho was only seven years old, and his father had so
little courage under the blow, that he threw up his practice, deserted
his children, and died in purposeless wanderings through Germany.
The burden that the weak and selfish throw down, must be taken
up by the brave. Friendly kinsfolk charged themselves with the
maintenance of the four orphans. Maximilian Avas sent to the school
of the town, whence he proceeded with a sisarship to the college of
Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an apt and studious pupil, but
austere and disposed to that sombre cast of spirits which is common
enough where a lad of some sensibility and much self-esteem finds
himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority. Robespierre’s
worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds ; with the uni-
versal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tell how the
untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish so
poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister’s heart
ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always a
sentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for
the great high priest of the sentimental tribe. Rousseau was then
passing the last squalid days of his life among the meadows and
woods at Ermenonvillc. Robespierre, who could not have been
more than twenty at the time, for Rousseau died in the summer of
1778, is said to have gone on a reverential pilgrimage in search of an
oracle from the lonely sage, as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred
others had gone before him. Rousseau was wont to use his real
adorers ae ill as he used his imaginary enemies, ^bespiorre may

170

HOBESPIEBBE.

well baTe ^ared the discouragement of the enthusiastic father who^
informed BiOusseau that he was about to bring up his son on tlie^
principles of Emilim. “Then so much the worse,” cried the
perverse philosopher, “both for you and your son.” If he had been
endowed with second sight, lie would have thought at least as rude a
presage due to this last and most ill-starred of a whole generation of
neophytes.

In 1781 Eobespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of
his relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
'advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was
not wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about
which the world is mute, but whoso better ordering and governance
would give a diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not
escape the ordeal of youth, Eobesiiicrre was frugal, laborious, and
persevering. His domestic amiability made him the delight of his
sister, and his zealous self-sacrifice for tho education and advancement
in life of his younger brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Eobes-
pierre’s devotion through all the red and horrible hours of Thermidor.
Though cold in temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and
fond of industrious seclusion, Eobespierre did not disdain the social
diversions of the town. Ho w'as a member of a reunion of Eosati,
who sang madrigals and admired one another's bad verses. Those
who love the ironical surprises of fate, may picture tho young man
who was doomed to play so lerrible a part in terrible affairs, going
through the harmless follies of a ceremonial reception by the Eosati,
taking throe deep breaths over a rose, solemnly fastening the emblem
to his coat, emptying a glass of rose- red wine at a draught to tho
good liealth of the company, and finally reciting couplets that
Voltaire would have found almost as detestable as the Law of Prairial
or the Festival of tho Supreme Being. More laudable efforts of
ambition were prize essays, in which Eobespierre has the merit of
taking tho right side in important questions. He protested against
the inhumanity of laws that inflicted civil infamy upon the innocent
family of a convicted criminal. And he protested against the still
more horrid cruelty whicli reduced unfortunate children born out of
wedlock to something like the status of the mediaeval serf. Eobes-
pieire s compositions at this time do not rise above the ordinary level
of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a manhood of benignity
and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on political reforms
was better than to ignore or to oppose political reform. But tho
course of events afterwards owed their least desirable bias to the fact
that such compositions were tho nearest approach to political training
that. so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent. One is inclined
to apply to practical politics Arthur Young’s sensible remark about
the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of Freijoh wool :

HOBESPZEBBE.

171

« A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3 or 4,000 acres, would
iu a few years do more for their wools than all the academiciauB and
philosophers will effect in ten centuries.**

In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of
local celebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the
authorities to remove a lightning conductor from his house within
three days, as being a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger
and an annoyance to his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the in-
novator’s case on appeal, and won it. He defended a poor woman
who had been wrongfully accused by a monk belonging to the power-
ful corporation of a great neighbouring abbey. The young advocate
did not oven shrink from manfully arguing a case against the august
bishop of Arras himself. His independence did him no harm. The
bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge or legal assessor
in the ejjiscopal court. This tribunal was a remnant of what had
once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the bishops of
Arras. That a court with the power of life and death should thus
exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, is an
illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and its
administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not
hold his office long. Everyone has heard the striking story, how
the young judge whose name was within half-a-dozen years to take
a place in the popular mind of France and of Europe with the
bloodiest monsters of myth or history, resigned his post in a fit of
remorse after condemning a murderer to be executed. *‘Ho is a
criminal, no doubt,** Robespierre kept groaning in reply to the con-
solations of his sister, for w’omen are more positive creatures than
men : a criminal, no doubt ; but to put a man to death !** Many
a man thus begins tlie great voyage with queasy sensibilities, and
ends it a cannibal.

Among Robespierre’s associates in the festive mummeries of the
Rosati was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to bo his
colleague in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an
important name in French history. In the garrison of Arras Carnot
was quartered, — that iron head, whose genius for the administrative
organization of war achieved even greater things for the new republic
than the genius of Ijouvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Car-
not surpassed not only Louvois, but perhaps all other names save one
in modern military history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for
organization, both the strategic talent that planned 't!^e momentous
campaign of 1794, and the splendid personal energy and skill that
prolonged the defence of Antwerp against the allmd army in 1814.
Partisans dream of the unrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom
that would have fallen to the lot of France, if only the gods had
brought^bout a hearty union between the military genius of Oaraot^

172

HOBESPIEEBE.

and the political genius of Eobespierre. So no doubt after the
restoration of Charles II. in England, there were good men who
thought that all would have gone very diflEerently, if only the genius
of the great creator of the Ironsides had taken counsel with the
genius of Venner, the Fifth-Monarchy Man, and Feak the Anabaptist
prophet.

The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to
be tried with fire, when they were to drink the cup of fury and the
dregs of the cup of trembling. Sybils and prophets have already
spoken their inexorable decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that
first gives the man to the world ; no time and no might can break
the stamped mould of his character ; only as life wears on do all its
aforeshapen lines come into light. He is launched into a sea of ex-
ternal conditions that arc as independent of his own will as the
temperament with which he confronts them. It is action that tries,
and variation of circumstance. Tlie leaden chains of use bind many
an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the soul ; and when the habit of
their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate arc capable of
antics beyond provision. A great crisis of the world was prepared
for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his destroyers, who
with him came like the lightning and went like the wind.

At the end of 1788 the King of Franco found himself forced to
summon the States General. It was their first assembly since 1614.
On the memorable Fourth day of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at
Versailles as one of the representatives of the third estate of his native
province of Artois. The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to
this renowned assembly, the immense demands and boundless expecta-
tions that they disclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events,
if in that heated air a cool observer could have been found, that the
hour had struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of
revolution that had risen in the minds of many shrewd men, good
and bad, in the course of the previous half-century. No great event
in history ever comes wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes
are so wide-reaching, many, and continuous, that their direction is
always sure to strike the eye of some observer in all its significance.
Lewis the Fifteenth, whose invincible weariness and heavy disgust
veiled a penetrating discernment, measured accurately the scope of the
conflict between the crown and the parlements : but, said he, things
as they are will last my time. Under the roof of his own palace at
Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de Pompadour’s famous
physician, one of Quosnai’s economic disciples had cried out, ** The
realm, is in a sore way ; it will never be cured without a great
internal commotion ; but woe to those who have to do with it ;
into such work the French go with no slack hand.” Rousseau, in a
passage in the Confessions, not only divines a speedy convu^ion, but

3[EBiRE •

173

with striking practical sagacity enumerates the political and social
causes that were unavoidably drawing France to the edge of the
abyss. Lord Chesterfield, so different a man from Eousseau, declared
as early as 1752, that he saw in France every symptom that history
had taught him to regard as the forerunner of deep change ; before
the end of tho century, so his prediction ran, both the trade of king
and the trade of priest in France would be shorn of half their glory.
D’Argenson in the same year declared a revolution inevitable, and
with a curious precision of anticipation assured himself that if once
the necessity arose of convoking the States General, they would not
assemble in vain : qu'on y prenne garde ! ik seraient fort aerieux !
Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering through France, towards 1765,
discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial corporations,
that the genius of freedom was entering the kingdom in dis-
guise, and that a succession of three weak monarchs would end in
the emancipation of the people of France. The most touching of all
these presentiments is to be found in a private letter of the great
Empress, the mother of Marie Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa
describes the ruined state of the French monarchy, and only prays
that if it be doomed to ruin still more utter, at least the blame may
not fall upon her daughter. Tho Empress had not learnt that when
the giants of social force are advancing from the sombre shadow of
the past with tho thunder and tho hurricane in their hands, our poor
prayers arc of no more avail than the visions of a dream.

The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to, before
every means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried.
Historians sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and
reforming minister of the century. God forbid that wo should put
any other minister on a level with that high and beneficent figure.
But Turgot was not the first statesman, both able and patriotic, who
had been disgraced for want of compliance with the conditions of
success at court ; he was only the last of a series. Ohauvelin, a
man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed with ignominy in 1736.
Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and wise, shared the same
fate twenty years later ; and in his case revolution was as cruel and
as heedless as reaction, for at the age of ninety-one, the old man was
dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence
dispatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and Machault, the
elder D’Argenson, who was greater than either of them, had been
raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for
no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and that he
would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the breath of life
in the great gallery at Yersaillea and on the smooth-diaven lawns of
Fontainebleau.

Hot only had wise counsellors been tried ; oozisiiltatito assemhUes

174

BOBESPlEBlUi:.

had been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after
publishing the memorable Report which first initiated the nation
in the elements of financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater,
and the monarchy drew nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only
modem parallel to the state of things in France under Lewis the
Sixteenth is to be sought in the state of things in Egypt or in
Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of between two and
three thousand millions of livres, but this had been wiped out by the
heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which have
‘ never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew
again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
hundred and forty millions sterling ; and it is interesting to notice
that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great
Britain at the same time. The year’s excess of expenditure over
receipts in 1774, was about fifty millions of livres : iQ^1787 it was
one hundred and forty millions, or according to a differimt computa-
tion even two hundred millions. The material case was not at all
desperate, if only the court had been less infatuated, and the spirit
of the privileged orders had been less blind and less vile. The
fatality of the situation lay in the characters of a handful of men
and women. For France was abundant in resources, and oven at this
moment was far from unprosperous, in spite of the incredible
trammels of law and custom. An able financier with the support of
a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign could have had
no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the conditions,
simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were unat-
tainable so long as power remained witli a caste that were anything
we please exccx)t patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought
together, but it was only the empty phantasm of national representa-
tion. Yet the situation was so serious that even this body, of
arbitrary origin as it was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The
privileged order, who were then as their descendants are now, the
worst conservative party in Europe, immediately persuaded, the
magisterial corporation to resist the Notables. This judicial corpora-
tion, or Parliament, of Paris had been suppressed under Lewis the
Fifteenth and unfortunately revived again at the accession of his
grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the French govern-
ment, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal legislation,
on the ground that such legislation was part of the general police
of the realm. The king’s minister, now Lomdnie de Briennc,
devm^ a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles,
the lawyers, all united in protestations against such a blow.
"iSlio common people are not always the best judges of a remedy
for the* evils under which they are the greatest sufferers, and they

bobespibriue:.

175

Iroke out in disorder both in Paris and the provinces. They dis-
-cerned an attack upon their local independence. Nobody would
accept offices in the new courtSi and the administration of justice
was at a standstill. A loan was thrown upon the market, but the
public could not be persuaded to take it up. It was impos.uble to
collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt was unpaid,
and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an announce-
ment that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total
number of fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision,
but it must have been very considerable, especially in Paris and
the other great cities. Add to these all the civil litigants in the
kingdom who had portions of their property virtually sequestrated
by the suspension of the courts into which the property had been
taken. The resentment of this immense body of defrauded public
•creditors and injured private suitors explains the alienation of the
middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions of our own
time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the popula*
tion without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities
shared by those who had had something to lose and had lost it.

Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had
been tried; both liad failed, and there was no other device left,
except one which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the
Sixteenth was in 1789 in much the same case as that of the king of
England in 1C40. Charles had done his best to raise money without
any parliament for twelve years: he had lost patience with the
Short Parliament ; finally he was driven without choice or alterna-
tive to face us he best could the stout resolution and the wise
patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men sometimes wonder how it
was that Lewis, when he came to find the National Assembly un-
manageable, and discovering how rapidly he was drifting towards
the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not break up a
chamber over which neither Lhc court nor even a minister so popular
as Necker had the least control. It is a question whether the sword
would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
Assembly, the king would still have been left in the aa-TWft desperate
straits from which he had looked to the States General to extricate
him. He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could
not disperse debt and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted
him as implacably as ever. There was no new formula of exorcism^
nor ai^ untried enchantment. The success of vident deaigna

176

BOBESPIEBBE.

against the National Assembly, had success been possible, could
after all have been followed by no other consummation than tho
relapse of France into the raging anarchy of Poland or the sullen
decrepitude of Turkey.

This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But in
truth there are two popular ways of reading the history of events
between 1789 and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the
other. According to one, whatever happened in the Revolution was
g[Ood and admirable, because it happened. According to the other,
something good and admirable was always attainable and, if only bad
men had not interposed, always ready to happen. Of course the
only sensible view is that many of the revolutionary solutions were
detestable, but no other solution was within reach. This is un-
doubtedly the best of possible worlds ; if the best is not so good as
we could wish, that is the fault of the possibilities. Such a doctrine
is neither fatalism nor optimism, but an honest recognition of long
chains of cause and effect in human affairs.

The great gathering of chosen men was first called States General ;
then it called itself National Assembly ; it is commonly known in
history as the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical
association, for the constitution which it framed after much travail,
endured for no more than a few months. Its deliberations lasted
from May, 1789, until September, 1791. Among its members
were three principal groups. There was first a band of blind
adherents of the old system of government with aU or most of
its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed
men, who were for transforming the old absolutist system into
something that should resemble the constitution of our own country.
Finally, there was a Left, with some differences of shade, but
all agreeing in the necessity of a thorough re-modelling of every
institution and most of the usages of the country. ‘^Silence,
you thirty votes ! ” cried Mirabeau one day, when he was inter-
rupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was the original
measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to wield
the destinies of France. In our own time wo have wondered at the
rapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of
bringing back the grand-nephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself
a little later voting that Republic which has been ratified by the
nation, and has at this moment the ardent good wishes of every
enlightened politician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to
think that within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Six-
teenih., tiiere was probably not one serious republican in the repre-
senii^te assembly of France. Yet it is always so. We might
just the same remark of the House of Commons at West-
lldi|«ter in 1640, and of the Assembly of Massachusetts or of New

BOBESPIERRE.

177

York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long unconscious train of
thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock. It is a mistake to set
these swift changes down to political levity ; they were due rather
to quickness of political intuition. It was the king’s attempt at
flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a republican party.
It was that shameful exploit, and no theorctieal preferences, that
awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the sacrifice of
inonaTchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.

Political intuition was never one of Bobespierre’s conspicuous
gifts. But ho had a doctrine that for a certain time served
the same purpose. Bousseau had kindled in him a fervid demo-
cratic enthusiasm, and had penetrated his mind with the principle
of the Sovereignty of the People. This famous dogma contained
implicitly within it the more indisputable truth that a society
ought to be regulated wdth a view to the happiness of the people.
Such a principle made it easier for Bobespierre to interpret
rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages
of authority would have been against the popular party. The first
insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camillo
Desmoulins at the Palais Boyal, with the fall of the Bastille, with
the murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melo-
dramatic horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of
the fourteenth of July, 1789, taught Bobespierre a lesson of
practical politics which exactly fitted in with his previous theories.
In his resentment against the oppressive disorder of monarchy and
feudalism, he had accepted the counter principle that the people can
do no wrong, and nobody of sense now doubts that in their first
great act the people of Paris did what was right. Six days after the
fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for issuing a proclamation
denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous vigilance.
Bobespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that even his
name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure bench
on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the pro-
posed proclamation : — “Bevolt! But this revolt is liberty. The
battle is not at its end. To-morrow, it may be, the shameful
designs against us will be renewed ; and who will there then be to
repulse them, if beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels
who have rushed to arms for our protection and safety P '' . This
was the cardinal truth of the situation. Everybody knows Mira-
beau’s saying about Bobespierre: — ^^That man will go far: he
believes every word that he says ! ” This is much, but it is only
half. It not only that the man of power believes what h^ bbjb ;

VOL. XX. N.S. N

178

BOfiESPlEiatE.

irhat lie believes must fit in with tbe facts and with the demands of
the time. Now Robespierre’s firmness of conviction happened at
this stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.

It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of
laughter with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as
terrible as solno uncouth antediluvian, or tho unfamiliar monsters
of the sea, or one of the giant plants that make men shudder with
mysterious fear. The history of our own country in the eighteenth
century tells of the riots against meeting-houses in Doctor Sache-
verell’s time, and the riots against papists and their abettors in
Lord George Gordon’s time, and Church-and-King riots in Doctor
Priestley’s time. It would be teo bold, therefore, to maintain that
the rabble of the poor have any more unerring political judgment
than the rabble of the opulent. But in France in 1789 Robespierre
was justified in saying that revolt meant liberty. If there had
been no revolt in July, the court party would have had time to
mature their infatuated designs of violence against the Assembly.
In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists at
Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of the
Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new
emblem of freedom passionately under foot. The news of this
odious folly soon travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily
understood by a populace whoso wits were sharpened by famine.
Thousands of fire-eyed women and men tramped intrepidly out
towards Versailles. If they had done less, the Assembly would have
been dispersed or arbitrarily decimated, though such a measure
would certainly have left the government in desperation.

At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter
of guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If
he had accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have
been difterent ; but its march w'ouldhavo been just as irresistible, for
revolution lay in tbe force of a hundred combined circffimstances.
Lewis, however, rejected these counsels, and sufiered the mob to
carry him in bewildering procession to his capital and his prison.
That great man who was watching French affairs with such con-
suming eagerness from distant Beaconsficld in our English Buck-
inghamshire, instantly divined that this procession from Versaces
to the Tuilerics marked the fall of the monarchy. “ A revolution in
sentiment, manner, and moral opinions,” the most important of all
revolutions in a word, was in Burke’s judgment to be dated from tho
Sixth of October, 1789.

The events oS. that day did indeed give its definite cast to the
situatioi^. . The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end,
along ^th the ancient and reverend mystery of the invio^bility of

ROBESPIBBKE.

179

his person. The Count d* Artois, the king’s second brother, one of
the most worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister
and suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own
throne forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty
after the insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October,
a troop of the nobles of the court followed him. The personal
cowardice of the Emigrants was only matched by their political
blindness. Many of the most unwise measures in the assembly were
only passed by small majorities, and the majorities would have been
transformed into minorities if in the early days of the revolution,
these unworthy men had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish
oligarchies have scarcely ever been wanting in courage ; the emigrant
noblesse of France are almost the only instance of a great privileged
and territorial caste that had as little bravery as they had patriotism.
The explanation is that they had been an oligarchy not of power or
duty but of self-indulgence. They wore crushed by RicheUeu to
secure the unity of the monarchy. They now efiiioed themselves at
the Bevolution, and this secured that far greater object, the unity
of the nation.

The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not
the only abdication on the part of the conservative powers. Cowed
and terrified by the events of October, no less than three hundred
members of the Assembly sought to resign. The average attendance
even at the most important sittings was often incredibly small.
Thus the chamber came to have little more moral authority in face
of the people of Paris than had the King himself. The people of
l^aris had themselves become in a day the masters of France.

This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in the
position of Bobespierre. He found the situation of afiairs at last
falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Bousseau had
taught him that the people ought to bo sovereign, and now the
people were being recognised as sovereign de facto no loss than
de jure. Any limitations on the new divine right united the horror
of blasphemy to the secular wickedness of political treason. After
the Assembly had come to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of
mad fury murdered an unfortunate baker who was suspected of
keeping back bread. These paroxysms led ,to the enactment of a
new martial law. Bobespierre spoke vehemently against it ; such a
law implied a wrongful distrust of the people. Then discussions fol-
lowed as to the property qualification of an elector. Citizens were
classed as active and passive. Only those were to have votes who
paid direct taxes to the amount of three days’ wages in the year.
Bobespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinction with
bitter tenacity. If all men are equal, he cried, then all men ought
to have votes : if he who only pays the amount of one day’s work

n2

180

BOBESPIERBE.

has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days,
why should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than
ibe otiier who only pays the earnings of three days ? This kind of
reasoning bad little weight with the Chamber, but it made the
reasoner very popular with the throng in the galleries. Even within
the Assembly, influence gradually came to the man who had a
parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and who was ready with
a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose. He began to
stand out like a needle of sharp rock amid the flitting shadows
of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims.

Kobespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing
which can be described as a policy. He was the prophet of
a sect, and had at this period none of the aims of the chief of a
political party. What he had was democratic doctrine, and an
intrepid logic. And Eobespierre’s intrepid logic was the nearest
approach to calm force and coherent character that the first three
years of the Eevolution brought into prominence; When the
Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almost within a few
weeks, this well-meaning but very incompetent divinity had slipped
from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeau came
next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted him
above all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. And on
the memorable Twenty- third of June, ^89, he had shown the genuine
audacity and resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred
the Chamber to defy the king’s command, and hailed the royal
usher with the following words: — “You, sir, have neither place
nor right of speech. Go tell those who sent you that we are here
by the will of the people, and only bayonets shall drive us hence ! ”
But Mirabeau bore a tainted character, and was always distrusted.

“ Ah, how the immorality of my youth,” he used to say, in words
that sum up the tragedy of many a puissant life, “ how the immo-
rality of my youth hinders the public good ! ” The event proved that
the popular suspicion was just : the patriot is now no longer merely
suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands with the money of
the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said ; he allowed
himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doing
battle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau’s popularity waned
towards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the
generous and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who
to the very end hoped against hope to save both the throne and its
occupant. By the spring of 1791 Barnave followed his prede-
cessors into disfavour. The Assembly was engaged on the burning
question of the government of the colonies. Were the negro slaves
admitted to citizenship, or was a legislature of planters to be
ehfenisted with the task of social reformation P Our own gperation

BOBESPIEBBE.

181

has seen in the republic of the West what strife this political diffi-
culty is capable of raising. Bamave pronounced against the negroes.
Itohespiorre, on the contrary, declaimed against any limitation of
the right of the negro as a compromise with the avarice, pride, and
cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty trafficking with the rights
of man. Barnave from that day saw that his laurel crown had gone
to Bobespierre.

If the people ^ called him noble that was now their hate, him
vile that was their garland/ they did not transfer their affec-
tions without sound reason. Bamave’s sensibility was too easily
touched. There are many politicians in every epoch whose prin-
ciples grow slack and flaccid at the approach of the golden sun
of royalty. Bamave was one of those who was sent to bring back
the fugitive king and queen from Varennes, and the journey by
their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became one of the
court’s clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility of
imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take
too much pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis
the Sixteenth to a popular constitution and the abolition of feudal-
ism was practically as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius
the Ninth to the doctrine of a free church in a free state. Those
who believe in the miracle of free will may think of this as they
please; but sensible people who accept the scientific account of
human character, know that the sudden transformation of a man or
a woman brought up to middle ago as the heir to centuries of
absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government that agreed with
the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on condition of
supernatural interference. The king’s good nature was no substitute
for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of the
degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the 14th of July,
when the Bastille fell, and the 6th of October, when he was carried
in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
entry, And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to

keep the king to a purpose. La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep
together a number of well oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was
guided by a more energetic and less compliant character than his own.

Marie Antoinette’s high mien in adversity, and the contrast
between the dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes
of outrage and bloody death that made the climax of her fate,
could not but strike the imaginations of men. Such contrasts are
the very stuff of which Tragedy, the gorgeous muse with * scepter’d
pall,’ loves to weave her most imposing raiment. But history must
be just ; jeind the character of the Queen had far more concern in the ^

182

B0BE8FIEBBE.

disaster of the first five years of the Rovolution, thou had the
oharaoter of Bobespierre. Every new document that comes to light
heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choice of personal gratifica-
tion before the common weal be enough to constitute a state criminal,
then the Queen of France was one of the worst state criminals that
ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie Antoinette
sprang from a sound instinct. IfVo shall never know how
much or how little truth there was in those frightful charges
against her, that may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These
imputed depravities far surpass anything that John Enox over
said against Mary Stuart, or that Juvenal has recorded against
Mossalina; and perhaps for theonly parallel we must look to thchideous
stories of the Eyzantine secretary against Theodora, the too famous
empress of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. "VTe have to
remember that all the revolutionary portraits are distorted by furious
passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more deserve to be com-
pared to Mary Stuart, than Robespierre deserves to bo compared to
Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if libels
they were. It is at least certain that from the unlucky
hour when the Austrian arch duchess crossed the French frontier,
a childish bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of
France made the attempt to re-cross it in resentful flight one and
twenty years afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteach-
able, blind to events and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her
heroic mother, the evil genius of her husband, the despair of her truest
advisers, and an exceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When
Burke had that immortal vision of her at Versailles — ‘‘just above
the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just
began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and
splendour and joy ” — ^we know from the correspondence between
Maria Theresa and her minister at Versailles, that what Burke really
saw was no divinity but a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an
accomplice in all the ignoble intrigues and a sharer of all the small
busy passions that convulse the insects of a court. The levity that
came with her Lorraine blood, broko out in incredible dissipations ;
in indiscreet visits to the masked balls at the opera, in midnight
parades and mystifications on the terrace at Versailles, in insensate
gambling. “The court of France is turned into a gaming-hell,^’
said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen’s own brother : “if they do not
amend, the revolution will be cruel.” These vices or foUies were less
mischievous than her intervention in affairs of state. Here her
levity was as marked os in the paltry affairs of the boudoir and the
ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both dissimulation and
vindictiveness* It was the Queen’s influence that procured the dis-
missal of'ttie two virtuous ministers by whose aid the ^ing was

!K03fiSPl£fipfi£ •

183

stnYing to arrest the decay of the goyemment of his kingdom.
Malcsherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that she
wanted his post for somo favourite’s favourite. Against Turgot she
conspired with tenacious animosity^ because he had suppressed a
sinecure which she designed for a court parasite^ and because he
would not support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her
&ction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day.
The Queen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the
affair. This was a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot
thrown into the Bastille. I am as one dashed to the ground,” cried
the great Voltaire, now nearing his end ; — “ Never can we console
ourselves for having seen the golden age dawn and vanish. My
eyes see only death in front of me now that Turgot is gone. The rest
of my days must be all bitterness.” What hope could there be that
the personage who had thus put out the light of hope for Franco in
1776, would welcome that greater flame which was kindled in the
land in 1789 ?

When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always
recall the poor woman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking
up a hill to ease his horse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortu-
nate creature was only twenty-eight, she might have been taken for
sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, her face so furrowed and
hardened by toil. Her husband, she said, had a morsel of land, one
cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had to pay forty-two pounds of
wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, and one hundred and
sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc to another, besides
very heavy taiUes and other tuxes ; and they had seven children.
She had heard that something was to be done by some great folks
for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send
us better, for the tallies and the dues grind us to the earth.” It was
such hapless drudges as this who replenished tho Queen’s gaming
tables at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of
their harassed and desperate days, less like men and women than
beasts of the field wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen,
in order that tho Queen might gratify her childish passion for
diamonds, or lavish money and estates on worthless female
Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a cost of five hundred louis
a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The Queen, it is true, was
in all this no worse than other dissipated women then and since.
She did not realise that it was the system to which she had stub-
bornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to cut
their crop green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
could not wait, or made them cower whole days in their beds,
because there misery seemed to gnaw them with a duller ioE^.
That she was unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the hH

184

BOBESPIEBBE.

drift of her policy; makes no difference in the judgment that wo
ought to pass upon it^ nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stem
men who rose up to consume her and her court with righteous
flame. The Queen and the courtiers and the hard-faring woman of
Mars-le-Tour and that whole generation have long been dust and
shadow ; they have vanished from the earth, as if they were no more
than the fire-flies that the peasant of the Italian poet saw dancing in
the vineyard, as he took his evening rest on the hill-side. They
have all fled back into the impenetrable shade whence they came ; our
minds are free ; if social equity is not a chimera, Marie Antoinette
was the protagonist of the most barbarous and execrable of causes.

Let iis return to the shaping of the Constitution, the stability of
which was to depend upon the Quccn^s loyalty. Robespierre left
some characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed
upon the Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from
accepting office under the crown for a period of four years after the
dissolution. Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated
a very singular truth ; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in
humanity in general seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of
all human beings in particular. He proceeded further in the same
direction. It was Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a
self-denying ordinance. All its members were declared ineligible for
a seat in the legislature that was to replace them. The members of
the Right on this occasion wont wuth their bitter foes of the Extreme
Left, and to both parties have been imputed sinister and Machia-
vellian motives. The Right, awai*e that their own return to the
new Assembly w^as impossible, were delighted to reduce the men
with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for two long
years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on the
other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken tho
new legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian
clubs. There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in
Robespierre’s mind. Tho reasons he gave were exactly of the kind
that we should have expected to weigh with a man of his stamp.
There is even a certain truth in them, that is not inconsistent with
the experience of a parliamentary country like our own. To talk^
he said, of the transmission of light and experience from one assembly
to another was to distrust the public spirit. The influence of opinion
and the general good grows less, as the influence of parliamentary
orators grows greater. He had no taste, he proceeded with one of
his ehilly sneers, for that new science which was styled the tactics of
gftat assemblies ; it was too liko intrigue. Nothing but truth and
reason oi^t to reign in a legislature. He did not like the idea oi
clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and then perpetu*

BOBESPIERBE.

185

ating tbeir empire from one assembly to another. He wound up his
discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When
he sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations such as
a few months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now
wrapped in eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon.
The folly of Robespierre^s inferences is obvious enough. If
only truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature, then it is all
the more important not to exclude any body of men through whom
truth and reason might possibly enter. Robespierre had striven
hard to remove all restrictions from admission to the electoral
franchise. He did not see that to limit the choice of candidates
was in itself the most grievous of restrictions.

The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished
because its creators were thus disabled from defending the work of
their hands. This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after
Robespierre had gone to his grave. The Convention, framing the
Constitution of the Year III., decided that two-thirds of the existing
assembly should keep their places, and that only one-third should be
popularly elected. This led to the revolt of the Thirteenth Vende-
maire, and afterwards to the coup d^'etat of the Eighteenth Fructidor.
In that sense no doubt Robespierre’s proposal was the indirect
root of much mischief. But it is childish to believe that if a
hundred of the most prominent members of the Constituent had
found scats in the new assembly, they would have saved the
Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is the fashion
to deplore, could have had no application to the strange combinations
of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such deadly
rapidity in every quarter of the horizon like vast sombre banks of
impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been some-
where said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of
the Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their
assumption that the Revolution was made, while all France was still
tom by fierce and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was
one of the most striking pieces of self-deception in history. It
is told how in the eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the
Crusaders tramped across Europe on their way to deliver the Holy
City from the hands of the unbelievers, the wearied children, as they
espied each new town that lay in their interminable march, cried out
with joyful expectation, ' Is not this then Jerusalem P ’ So France
had set out on a portentous journey, little knowing how far off was
the end ; lightly taking each poor halting-place for the deqdy
longed-for goal ; and waxing more fiercely disappointed as each new
height they gained only disclosed yet further and more unattainable
horizons. Alas,” said Burke, ** they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken, before they can form themselves into a mass which
has a true political personality.”

186

B0SB8PI£EBE.

An inunense revolution had been effected, but by wbat force were
its fruits to be guarded P Each step in the revolution had raised a
host of irreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and
jealous associations of local independence, the traditions of personal
dignity, the relations of the civil to the spiritual power — ^these were
the momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Con-
stituent had exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber
had for these two years past been laying mine and counter-mine
among the very deepest foundations of society. One by one, each
-great corporation of the old order had been alienated from the
new order. It was inevitable that it should be so. Let us look at
one or two examples of this. The monarchy had imposed upon Eronce
administrative centralisation without securing national unity. Thus
the great provinces that had been slowly added, one after the other,
to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same kingdom still
retained different institutions and isolated usages. The time was now
come when France should be France, and its inhabitants Frenchmen,
and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provenfals. The
Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
administrations, the separate parliaments, the peculiar privileges,
and even the historic names of the old provinces. We Uoed not
dwell on the significance of this change here, but will only remark
in passing that the stubborn disputes from the time of the Begency
downwards between the crown and the provincial parlements turned,
under other names and in other forms, upon this very issue of the
unification of the law. The Crown was on the progressive side, but
it lacked the strength and courage to set aside retrograde local
sentiment, as the Constituent Assembly set it aside.

Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government
was accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of
power. Popular election replaced the old system of territorial
privilege and aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital
innovation, followed as it was a few months later by a decree
abolishing titles and armorial bearings, w^as to complete the estrange-
ment of the old privileged classes from the revolutionary movement.
AH that they had meant to concede was the payment of on equal
land tax. What was life worth to the noble if common people were
to be allowed to wear arms, and to command a company of foot or a
troop of horse ; if he was no longer to have thousands of acres left
waste for the chase ; if he was compelled to sue for a vote where he
had ouly yesterday reigned as manorial lord ; if in short ho was at
B^j^ii^oke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which had
made not the decoration but the very substance of his days ?

Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipjper the only

BOBSSFIE&fiS.

187

outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments wore
inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of
the power of exciting against the new government the same
factious and impracticable spirit with which they had on so many
occasions embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even etiU
more violently into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for
resources, declared the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting
to a revenue of not less than eight million pounds sterling a year, or
double that amount in modem values, to be the property of the
nation. Talleyrand carried a measure decreeing the sale of the
ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were as intensely irritated as
laymen would have been by a similar assertion of sovereign right.
And their irritation was made still more dangerous by the next set
of measures against them.

The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the
religion of the State; monastic vows were aboHshed, and orders
and congregations suppressed ; the ecclesiastical division were made
to coincide with the civil division, a bishop being allotted to each
department. What was a more important revolution than all,
bishops and incumbents were henceforth to be appointed by popular
election. The Assembly, who had always the institutions of our
own country before them, meant to introduce into Franco the system
of the Church of England, which was even then an anachronism in
the land of its birth ; much worse was such a system an anachron-
ism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an Encyclo-
pasdia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit.
The Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics
should take the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the
clergy, on pain of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the
clergy refused, and the result was an outbreak of religious fury in
the great towns of the south and elsewhere, wliich recalled the
violence of the sixteenth century and the Beformation.

Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the
popular party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged
classes ; the magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone ; and
the clergy and as many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictive-
ness of their pastors. Immense material improvements had been
made, but who was to guard them against all these powerful and
exasperated bonds P "No chamber could execute so portentous an
office, least of all a chamber that was bound to work in accord with
a king who at the very moment when he was swearing fidelity to
the new order of things, was sending entreaties to the king of
Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow the
new order and bring back the old. If the revolution had achieved
priceless g^s for France, they could only be preserved on oon«

188

BOfiSSPIERSE.

dition that public action was directed by those who valued these
gains for tbemselves and for their children above all things else —
above the monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their
own sorry lives. There was only one party who showed this pas-
sionate devotion, this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that
had been done to be undone, and never to allow France to sink back
from exalted national life into the lethargy of national death. That
party was the Jacobins, and above all the austere and rigorous
^ Jacobins of Paris. On their ascendancy depended the triumph of
the revolution, and on the triumph of the revolution depended the
salvation of France. Their ascendancy meant a Jacobin dictatorship,
and against this, as against dictatorship in all its forms, many things
have been said, and truly said. But the one most important thing
that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in spite of all the
dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its course, it was
still the only instrument capable of concentrating and utilising the
dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis was not a
crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone understood, as the
old Covenanters had understood, that problems of force are not solved
by phrases but by mastery and the sword.

The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who
looked at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the
successor of the Constituent, met in the month of October, 1791.
Like its predecessor, the Legislative contained a host of excellent
and patriotic men, and they at once applied themselves to the all-im-
portant task, which the Constituent had left so deplorably incomplete,
of finally breaking down the old feudal rights. The most important
group in the new chamber were the deputies from the Gironde.
Events soon revealed violent dissents between the Girondins and the
Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting of the Legislative,
Girondins and Jacobins represented together in unbroken unity the
great popular party. From this time until the fall of the monarchy,
the whole of this popular party in all its branches found their
rallying-place not in the Assembly but in the Jacobin Club ; and
the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of
Palis. It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could
be commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted,
that is to say the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think
that the Bevolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no
position to see the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of
Austria and Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the
reactionary sentiment of La Vendee, the absolute unworkableness of
ti^ new constitution. Arthur Young in the height of the agitations
6i the Constituent Assembly found himself at Moulins, the capital of
tile ^ourbonnais and on the great post-road to Italy. , He went to

EOBESFIEABE.

189

tbe best coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty
tables spread for company, but as for a newspaper, he says he
might as well have asked for an elephant. In the capital of a
great province, the seat of an intendant, at a moment like that,
with a iKTational Assembly voting a revolution, and not a
newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette, Mirabeau, or
Lewis IVI. were on the throne ! Gould such a people as this, he
cries, over have made a revolution or become free? Never If a
thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the
whole. And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such
a truth, we shall see presently.

Bobespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in
France. To borrow the figure of an older chief of French faction,
from trifling among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to
the stage itself, and had a right to perform leading parts. Dis-
qualified for sitting in the Assembly, he wielded greater power than
ever in the Club. The Oonstituent had been full of his enemies.

Alone with my own soul,” he once cried to the Jacobins, “how
could I have borne struggles that were beyond any human strength,
if I had not raised my spirit to God ?” This isolation marked him
with a kind of theocratic distinction. These communings with the
unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogative to a man, even
among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet, the
youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D^Alembert,
of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Bobespierre was
at heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Priest is
the mystagogue in ofiice ; his own authority is bound up with the
prosperity and acceptance of his holy wares ; ho holds the neces-
sity of an intervener and interpreter, and that intervener is himself;
his spirit has no elasticity, no pliancy, no spaciousnesss ; it stifles
and is stifled. Decidedly Bobespierre had the sacerdotal tempera-
ment, its sense of personal importance, its thin unction, its private
leanings to the stake and the cord ; and he had one of those deplorable
natures that seem as if they had never known the careless joys of a
spring-time in their lives. By-and-by, from mere priest he deve-
loped into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.

The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal
to the pretensions of the pontiff. Bobespierre was only a couple of
inches above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was
hardly more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore
spect^les ; his face was pitted by the marks of small-pox ; his com-
plexion was dull and sometimes livid ; the tones of his voice wore
dry and shrill ; and he spoke with the vulgar accent of his pzpvinoe.
Such is the accepted tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from

190

BOBESFIEBBI:.

it. It is fair, however, to remember that Robespierre^s enemies had
command of his historic reputation at its source, and this is always
a great advantage for faction if not for truth. So Robespierre’s
voice and person may have been maligned, just as Aristophanes
may have been a calumniator when he accused Cleon of having an
intolerably loud voice and smelling of the tan-yard. What is
certain is that Robespierre was a master of effective oratory adapted
for a violent popular audience, to impress, to persuade, and to com-
^mand. The Convention would have yawned, if it had not trembled
under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious. Robes-
pierre’s style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none
of the thrilling sonorousness of the master ; the glow and the ardour
have become metallic ; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill
notes of splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings ; the
phrases have no quality of radiance ; the oratorical glimpses never
lift the spirit into new worlds. We arc never conscious of those
great pulses of strong emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly
measured periods of Cicero or Bossuet or Burke. Robespierre could
not rival the vivid and highly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud ;
his speeches were never heated with the ardent passion that poured
like a torrent of fire through some of the orations of Isnard ; nor,
above all, had he any mastery of that dialect of the Titans by which
Danton convulsed an audience with fear, with amazement, or with
the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of these intenser
qualities did not make Robespierre’s speeches less effective for their
own purpose. On the contrary, when the air has become torrid, and
passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in form is very likely to pass
for good sense in substance. That Robespierre had decent fluency,
copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The French have an
artistic sense ; they have never accepted our own whimsical doctrine,
that a man’s politics must be sagacious if his speaking is only clumsy
enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready with a
forcible reply on critical occasions : this only makes him an illustra-
tion the more of the good oratorical rule that he is most likely to
come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who is usually
most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about the
correctness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;
he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his dis-
courses, than he grudged the time given every day to the powdering
of his hair.

Hotihing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting
his cas^ James Mill used to point out to his son among other
skilfhrArts of Demosthenes these two : first, that he said everything

HiOUBSPIEfilUB •

191

important to his purpose at the exact moment when he had brought
the minds of his hearers into the state most fitted to receive it ;
second, that he insinuated gradually and indirectly into their minds
ideas which would have roused opposition if they had been expressed
more directly. Mr. Mill once called the attention of tho present
writer to exactly the same kind of rhetorical skill in the speeches of
Robespierre. The reader may do well to turn, for excellent specimens
of this, to the speech of January 11, 1792, against the war, or that
of May, 1794, against atheism. The logic is stringent, but the
premisses are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who should iterate
indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and mechanics, while
men are craving an architect who shall bridge the g^lf of waters.
Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of his ideas
and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his speeches,
us of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it is
transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which
tho critics of painting call Texture.

Ilis listeners, however, in tho old refectory of tho Convent of the
Jacobins, took little heed of these things ; the matter was too absorb-
ing, the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted cove-
nanters of the western Lowlands, with Olaverhouse’s dragoons a few
miles off, exulted in tho endless exhortations and expositions of their
hill preachers ; they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
Mucklowrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext.
We now find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts
of the Solemn League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid
of the picturesque and the impressive. If we cannot say the same
of the great preacher of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the
reason is partly that time has not yet softened the tones, and partly
that there is no one in all the world with whom it is so difficldt to
sympathise as with the narrower fanatics of our own particular faith.

We have still to mark the trait that above every thing else gave to
Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to
him, they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And
Robespierre in one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently
the possessor of a conscience. When the strain of circumstance in
the last few months of his life pressed him towards wrong, at least
before doing wrong ho was forced to lie to his own conscience. This
is a kind of honesty, as the world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an
artist exhibited Robespierre’s portrait, simply inscribing it. The
Incorruptible. Throngs passed before it every day, and ratifi^ the
honourable designation by eager murmurd of approval. The demo-
cratic journals were loud in panegyric on the unsleeping sentinel of
liberty. They loved to speak of him as the modem Fabricios^ and
delighted to^recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it is easier to turn the-

192

BOBESPIEEHE.

sun from its course than to turn Fabricius from the path of honour.
Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor for their
children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one countrywoman of
our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses, for women are
quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and recognising
they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with perti-
nacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
Mirabeau’s sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the
heavens.

Robespierre’s life was frugal and simple, as must always be
seemly in the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are
very hard. He had a single room in the house of Duplay, at the
extreme west end of the long Rue Saint Honor^, half a mile from
the Jacobin Club, aiul less than that from the Riding School of
the Tuilcrios where the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies held
session. Ilis room, which served him for bed-chamber as well as for
the uses of the day, was scantily furnished, and he shared the homely
fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a sworn follower of
Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their guest as if he had
been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest daughter of
the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and Robespierre
looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his country should
be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors within.

Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it
to be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his
influence arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become
more and more difficult. The court was more disloyal and more
perverse, as its hopes that the nightmare would come to an end
became fainter. In the summer of 1791, the German Emperor, the
King of Prussia, and minor champions of retrograde causes issued
the famous Declaration of Filnitz. The menace of intervention was
the one element needed to make the position of ther monarchy
desperate. It. roused France to fever heat. For along with the
foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the king to
declare war against Austria. Robespierre in spite of the strong tide
of warlike feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is
one of the most sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the
conflict were terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles
were victorious, all that the Revolution had won would be instantly
an.d irretrievably lost. If, on the > other hand, the French armies
ware victorious, one of two disasters might follow. The troops
lUight either become a weapon in the hands of the court and the
reactionUry party, for the suppression of all the progressive p:irties

EOBESPISBBE.

193

alike; or else their general might make himself supreme. Bohes-
pierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne and the
court in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing first to
crush the faction of emigrant nobles, then to make the king popular
at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army. The
Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideas
as Narbonne. The Girondins sought war ; first from a genuine, if
not a profoundly wise enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain
have spread all over the world ; and next because they thought war
would increase their popularity and give them decisive control of the
situation.

The first effect of the war declared in April, 1792, was to
shake down the throne. Operations had no sooner begun, than the
king became an object of bitter and amply warranted suspicion.
Neither the leaders nor the people had forgotten his flight a year
before, to place himself at the head of the foreign invaders, nor the
letter that he had left behind him for the National Assembly,
protesting against all that had been done. They were again
reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the king’s
friends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of
the foreign army set out on his march, and issued his famous
proclamation to the inhabitants of France, lie demanded imme-
diate and unconditional submission; he threatened with fire and
sword every town, village, or hamlet, that should dare to defend
itself ; and finally he swore that if the smallest violence or insult
were done to the king or his family, the city of Paris should be
handed over to military execution and absolute destruction. This insen-
sate docuipent bears marks in every line of the implacable hate and
burning thirst for revenge that consumed the aristocratic refugees.
Only civil war can awake such rage as Brunswick’s manifesto betrayed.
It was drawn up by the French nobles at Coblenz. He merely signed
it. The reply to it was the memorable insurrection of the Tenth of
xiugust, 1792. The king was thrown into prison, and the Legisla-
tive Assembly made way for the National Convention.

Robespierre’s part in the great rising of August was only secondary.
Only a few weeks before he had started a journal and written articles
in a constitutional sense. M. d’H^xicault. believes a story that
Robespierre’s aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor
for the young dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative but we
find great difiiculty in believing that such a post could ever have
been an object of Robespierre’s ambition. Now and always he
showed a rather singular preference for the substance of power over
its glitter. He was vain and on egoist, but in spite of this, and
in spite of his passion for empty phrases, he was not without a
sense of reality.

VOL. XX. N.'S. 0

B0BE6IP1EHBE.

194

The iD^rrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not
of Kobespierre, but of a more commanding j)ersonage, who now became
one of the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistro, that ardent
champion of reaction, found a striking argument for the presence
of the Divine hand in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of
the revolutionary leaders. How could such men, he asked, have
achieved such results, if they had not been instruments of the
directing will of Heaven ? Danton at any rate is above this caustic
criticism. Danton was of the Herculean type of a Luther, though
without Luther’s deep vision of spiritual things ; or a Chatham,
though without Chatham’s august majesty of life ; or a Cromwell,
though without Cromwell’s calm steadfastness of patriotic purpose.
His visage and j^ort seemed to declare his character: dark over-
hanging brows ; eyes that liad the gleam of lightning ; a savage
mouth ; an immense head ; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland
pictured him as a fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove
the Thunderer. His enemies saw in him the Satan of the Paradise
Lost. He was no moral regenerator; the difierence between
liim and Eobesj)ierre is typified in Danton’s version of an old saying,
that he who hates vices hates men. He was not free from that
careless life-contemning desperation which sometimes belongs to
forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because nobility
implies purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which were
not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to
the truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet
the line that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robes-
pierre passed for a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed
a desperado by his airs of ‘ immoral thoughtlessness.' . But the
world forgives much to a royal size, and Danton was one of the men
who strike deep notes. He had that largeness of motive, fulness of
nature, and capaciousness of mind, wdiich will always redeem a
multitude of infirmities.

Though the author of some of the most tremendous and far-
sounding phrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them,
yet phrases had no empire over him; he was their master, not
their dupe. Of all the men who succeeded Mirabeau as directors of
the unchained forces, we feel that Danton alone was in his true
element. Action, which poisoned the blood of such men as
Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of their senses
with exaltation, w'as to Danton his native sphere. When France
was for a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new
effort by the electrifying cry, “ JFe must dare^ and again dare^ and
mUhmt end dare ! " If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent
on trifles, too apt to confound side issues with the central aim
of the battle, Danton was ever ready to urge them to take a juster

BOBESFIEBBE.

195

measure : — ‘‘ When the edijwe is all ablaze , I take little heed of the knaves
who are pilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames'*
When base egoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the
personality of any man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by
the soul-inspiring exclamation, Let my name be blotted out and my
memory perish; if only France may he free** The Girondins
denounced the popular clubs of Paris as hives of lawlessness and
outrage. Danton warned them that it were wiser to go to these
seething societies and to guide them, than to waste breath in futile
denunciation. A nation in revolution,^’ he cried to them, in a superb
figure, is like the bronze boiling, and foaming, and purifying itself in
the cauldron. Not yet is the statue of liberty cast. Fiercely boils
the metal ; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame wiU surely
scorch you.” If there was murderous work below the hatches, that
was all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand
strong and ready on the wheel, with an cyo quick for each new drift
in the hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is
ever the figure under which one conceives Danton — a Titanic shape
doing battle with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood
sweeps wildly over him, and then with unshaken foothold and
undaunted front once more surveying the waste of waters, and
striving with dexterous energy to force the straining vessel over the
waters of the bar.

La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its
squalid lurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and
fled from it shrieking with averted hands. Marat thrust swords
into the giant’s half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody
incitement to slay hip and thigh, and so fllled the land with a horror
that has not faded from out of men’s minds to this day. Danton
instantly discerned that the problem was to preserve revolutionary
energy, and still to persuade the insurgent forces to retire once
more within their boundaries. Eobespierre discerned this too, but
he was paralysed and bewildered by his own principles, as the con-
vinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid the perplexities of practice :
the teaching of Eousseau was ever pouring like thin smoke among
his ideas, and clouding his view of actual conditions. The tenth
of August produced a considerable change in Robespierre’s point
of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness of the
slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing hestdlong.
His faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no cbock, but he
was in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole
march from now until the end, twenty-three months later« became
timorous, cunning, and oblique. His intelligenoe seemed to mote in
subterranean tunnels, with ^e gleam of an equivocal prmniss at one
end, and ihe mist of a vague conclusion at the othen

m

EOBESPIERRE.

The enihusiastio pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin
purism, and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning
archangel of his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. Tho
shock must have been tremendous. Bobespierre did not quail nor
retreat ; he only revised his notion of the situation. A curious
interview onco took place between him and Marat. Robes-
pierre began by assuring the Friend of tho People that he quite
understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the columns
of Marat’s newspaper were filled, to bo merely useful exaggerations
of his real designs. Marat repelled tho disparaging imputation of
clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein of
poniarding brigands, burning dei^ots alive in their palaces, and
empiiling tho traitors of tho Assembly on their own benches.
^‘Robespierre,” says Marat, “listened to me with affright ; ho turned
pale and said nothing. The interview confirmed tho opinion I had
always had of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly
honest man and the zeal of a good patriot with the enlightenment of
a wise senator, but that he was without either the views or the
audacity of a real statesman.” The picture is instructive, for it
shows us Robespierre’s invariable habit of leaving violence and
iniquity unrebuked ; of conciliating the practitioners of violence and
iniquity ; and of contenting himself with an inward hope of turning
the world into a right course by fine words. He had no audacity in
Marat’s sense, but he was no coward. He knew, as all these men
knew, that almost from hour to hour he carried his life in his hand,
yet he declined to seek shelter in the obscurity which saved such
men as Sieves. But if he had courage, he had not the initiative of a
man of action. He invented none of the ideas or methods of the
Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very dexterous
in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than
himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the
ambition to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would
be glad not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left
behind. His consciousness of pure aims allows him to become
an accomplice in the worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom
to be a theorist, he hastens to clear his character as a man of
practice by conniving at an enormity. Thus, in September,
1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous massacres in the
prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence goes to
show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in
his heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justify
what had been done. This was the beginning of a long course of
compliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has
been as hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for
the moment, measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to

BOBESPIEBBE.

197

mere compliance, on the one hand, and diabolic origination on the
other. Bat his position in the Bevolution is not rightly understood,
unless we recognise him as being in almost every case an accessory
after the fact.

Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of Bobespierre in
1794, France was the scene of two main series of events. One set
comprises the repulse of the invaders, the suppression of on extensive
civil war, and the attempted reconstruction of a social iromework.
The other comprises the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of
violent and short-lived factions. By an unhappy fetality, due partly
to anti-democratic prejudice, and partly to men’s unfailing passion
for melodrama, the Beign of Terror has been popularly token for
the central and most important part of tho revolutionary epic. This
is nearly as absurd os it would be to make Gustave Flourens’ mani-
festation of the Fifth of October, or the rising of the Thirty-first of
October, tho most prominent features in a history of the war of
French defence six years ago. In truth, the Terror was a mere
episode ; and just as tho rising of October, 1870, was duo to Marshal
Bazoino’s capitulation at Metz, it is easy to see that, with one excep-
tion, every violent movement in Paris, from 1792 to 1794, was duo
to menace or to disaster on the frontier. Every one of the famous
days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The storm
of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
was the response to Brunswick’s proclamation. Tho bloody
days of September were the reaction of panic at the capture of
Longwy and Yerdun by tho Prussians. Tho surrender of Gambrai
provoked the execution of Marie Antoinette. The defeat at
Aix-la-Ohapelle produced the abortive insurrection of tho Tenth of
March ; and tho treason of Dumouriez, the reverses of Gustine, and
the rebellion in La Yendee, produced tho effectual insurrection of
the Thirty-first of May, 1793. The last of these two risings of Paris,
headed by the Commune, against tho Convention which was until
then controlled by tho Girondins, at length gave the government of
France and the defence of the Bevolution definitely over to the
Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted unbroken for a short
period of ten months, and then the great party broke up into
factions. The splendid triumphs of tho dictatorship have been, in
England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes of
the factions remembered. Bobespiorre’s history unfortunately
belongs to the less important battle ; but we must reserve this more
eventful part of his life for a second paper.

EnnoB.

(To be concluded in the next number.)

UNSETTLED PEOBLEMS OF AMEEIOAN POLITICS.

The presidential election of 187G finds the two great parties of the
United States much more evenly balanced in strength than they have
been since 1860. In that year, the feeling of the people on the
slavery question had become so profound^ that it led to a great and
memorable defeat of the Democratic party, and in 1864 the same
feeling, added to the determination to preserve the Union, secured
the re-election of Mr. Lincoln. Four years later, the anxiety of the
Northern States to have all the “ war issues ” settled on a firm basis,
prompted the nomination of the general whose skill and energy had
crushed the rebellion, and the Democrats found themselves unable to
carry more than eight states against him. In 1872, the Democrats
chose as their candidate a man who had been their bitterest foe
throughout his lifetime, and their followers deserted them by
thousands. This paved the way for the easy success of General
Grant for the second time. ITis majority over Seymour in 1868 was
•105,458 ; over Greeley in 1872 it was 763,007. It might have been
better for the country, perhaps for the Eepublican party itself, if the
victory on the last occasion had been of a less overwhelming character,
for it seemed to produce the impression on the minds of some of the
leaders that their power was too firmly established to meet >vith any
serious reverse, and that the popxJar distrust of their opponents would
alone insure their continual success. This illusion received several
rude shocks in 1874, and when at last it was found that a Democratic
majority had been sent to the Lower House of Congress, everybody
could see that the greatest party which the country had ever known
— a party which in its time has received more signal proofs of the
confidence and affection of the people than any other — was placed in
a critical position, and could only be saved by the exercise of the
utmost circumspection and tact. It is now to be brought up for the
solemn judgment of the people, and the next three months will
decide its fate for years to come.

The Eepublicans have been in power for sixteen years, and what-
ever may be their shortcomings, it must be admitted that there never
was a party in any country which had heavier responsibilities thrust
upon it. The slavery question, which had been the subject of com-
promises ever since the foundation of the government, came up at
last, VI a shape which put out of the question all hopes of a peaceable
srittfement. No further contrivances for putting off the evil day of
reckoning were possible. When Lincoln was elected, it was seen
throughout the country that slavery was doomed, and Sou/;h Carolina
almost immediately took the step which has since been followed by so
Heavy a retribution. The Eepublicans found themselves face to face

UNSETTLED PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN POLITICS. 199

with civil war. The coarse of that terrible conflict need not be traced
here ; it mast safflee to say that the party in power succeeded in
bringing it to a close, althoagh many a time daring those foar blood-
stained years it seemed as if the Bepablican caaso and the Union
mast perish together. At last came peace, and a difficnlty of a
different, bat scarcely less serioas, kind confronted the Bepablicans.
They had to provide for the payment of the war bill ; to extinguish,
if they oould, the animosities kindled by the strife ; and to establish
an administration which might lead the people back to their old
prosperity. If they have not fully accomplished these great ends, it
ought to be remembered that the task imposed upon them was one
of enormous difficulty. The financial affairs of the nation were in a
state of chaos, and the industrial resources of the South, including its
entire labour system, were overturned. Party passions ran high,
great distrust and anxiety were felt concerning the South, and no
one could see what was to be done with the negroes. It had not yet
been suggested that it would be a wise or prudent policy to hand
over to the black race the governments of their States wherever they
were in a majority, and to reverse the positions of the two sections
of the Southern population — to make the slaves the masters and the
masters slaves.

At this critical moment, Mr. Lincoln perished by the hand of an
assassin. Andrew Johnson's administration, which followed, was a
prolonged brawl. General Grant went into office with the best inten-
tions, but the qualities which enable a man to win battles do not always
fit him to discharge delicate and difficult duties in civil life. The
second administration of General Grant carries with it a record
which he would doubtless be glad to efface from the page of history.
He is free from the stain of personal corruption, but ho has been too
much the slave of cliques, and the sagacity which almost always
enabled him to select the best men for work in the field seemed to
desert him when he was placed at the head of the Government. The
case of General Belknap, although a bad one, is by no means the only
instance in which President Grant has given his confidence to men
who were utterly unworthy of it, and who hastened to prove it by
basely betraying him. The Indian Department was for years the
scene of the grossest frauds. Yet it must not be supposed that all
the President’s appointments have been bad. He kept an incom-
petent Secretary of the Treasury in office, but he could not have
chosen a more capable Secretary of State than Governor Fish. In
like manner, the very responsible post of Collector of the Port of
N’ew York-^ post which is only second in financial importance to
that of the Secretary of the Treasury — has for several years hem
unexceptionably filled by General Arthur. Where the President has
failed, it ha^ been through mingled obstinacy and bad judgment, not
from any lack of patriotism, or want of respect for his great office^

200

try S ETI L ED FBOMiEMS 0? AJQSElCAlf POLITICS.

The Democratic party now claims the su£Prages of the people as
the party o£ reform. That is a claim which, if well founded, cannot
fail to awaken the sympathies of the country, especially in its
bearing upon the great problem which ten years of incessant
legislation has left in as hopeless a state as ever. There are several
important questions before the people — the question as to the proper
Ta&nagcineiit of the Debt ^ the Gurrency, and the Tariff , the School
question ; and the question of Administrative Eeform. Each will
enter more or less largely into the approaching elections, but the
greatest question of all — the most baffling and complex, and most
fraught with future good or evil to the country — is that which
relates to the true and thorough pacification of the South. It is
therefore essential to consider it with care.

It is often said that the Southern States have been “ reconstructed,”
that they are now thoroughly united with the rest of the country,
that all differences have been forgotten, and the old feuds of the
past dead and buried. There is, unfortunately, no well-informed
man who can persuade himself that this is true. The differences
between North and South may still be open io settlement ; but they
are not settled to-day. The election next November will be in a
great measure influenced by them. If the Democrats win, it will be
mainly by means of the Southern vote, and this they will almost
certainly get entire — the only probable exeeption being South
Carolina. The importance of this vote in a Presidential election will
be seen at a glance from the following table ; —

Northern Electoral Vote.

Southern Electoral Vote.

California

6

Alabama

10

Colorado

3

Arkansas

6

Connecticut

a

Florida

4

Delaware

3

Georgia

11

Dlinois

21

Kentucky

12

Indiana

lo

Louisiana

8

Iowa

11

Mississippi

8

Kansas

5

Missouri

15

Maine

7

North Carolina • . , ,

10

Maryland

8

South Carolina

7

Massachusetts

13

Tennessee

12

Michigan

11

Texas

H

Minnesota

o

Virginia

11

Nebraska

3

Nevada

3

Now Hampshire

5

New Jersey

. 9

New York

. 35

Ohio

. 22

Otegon

. 3

^Pennsylvania

. 29

Bhode Island

. 4

Yennont

. 5

WestYixginia

• 5

WiscoiiAn

. 10

247

122

UKSETTIA0 PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN POLITIOS. 201

Of the States here classed as Northern, in accordance with general
usage, there are eeveral which are very doubtful, and at least two or
three in which the Democrats are almost sure to succeed. Among
the latter must be mentioned Maryland and Delaware, and probably
Oregon, which has already given a Democratic majotity this year in
its State elections. The doubtful States arc New York — ^which Mr.
Tilden carried against a very popular governor in 1874, — and
Indiana, which it is thought may be carried by the influence of
Mr. Hendricks, the candidate for the Vice-Presidency. No doubt
this catalogue of doubtful states might be enlarged — the Democrats
fully expect to carry New Jersey and California, but if the five just
enumerated vote for Mr. Tilden, he will have quite enough to take
him to the White House on the 4th of next March. A Democrat
may always reasonably hope to carry some of the Northern or
Western States, and the whole or nearly the whole of the Southern.
Thus the South practically holds the balance of power. It will at
once be seen that the influence exerted by these States on the
forthcoming contest will be very great; equally great will be
their influence on the politics of the future. The Southern vote
has been divided of late years, not always by honourable means ;
there can bo little doubt that in future it will be cast as a unit
for the Democratic party. At the close of the rebellion, there
seemed a strong probability that at least a fair proportion of the
insurgent States could be led over to the Bepublican party, not-
withstanding their traditional alliance with the Democrats. How
that opportunity was lost can only be understood by an examination
of the famous Beconstruction policy, and an inquiry into its
results. The subject is too vast to be adequately treated in a few
pages ; but an attempt may be made to throw a little light upon it.

In December, 1865, the greater part of the conquered States sent
representatives to Congress. As the theory of the Government was
that they had never been out of the Union, and could not leave it,
there seemed no just or consistent reason for excluding them from
representation in the National Legislature. But they were ignomi-
niously driven away. Congress refused even to recognise their
local governments, divided the States into five military districts,
ordered new elections, and imposed the terms upon which those
elections should be carried out. It prescribed who should vote and
who should not vote, and in doing this it practically disfranchised
all the leading men in the Southern white population, while enfran-
chising the negroes without discrimination of any 1dnd» The States
were placed under Constitutions which the greater part of the
property-holders and educated class were not allowed to have a
voice in framing. That these measures were lawful under the Consti-
tution no-one maintained; they were justified as war measurest

202 rarSMTLKD PEOBLEirS OP AMBEICAN POLITICS.

Tital to'the preservation of the Union. Congress,” said Mr. H. J.
Raymond in the House, exercises powers never conferred upon it,
and denies to States rights expressly reserved to them by the Con-
stitution.” The Republican party was not alone responsible for
these measures, since they were in harmony with the temper of the
people at the time, and were even vehemently demanded. The
men who counselled a policy of a less rigorous kind were politically
ruined. Tet they were only guilty of possessing greater foresight
than most of their contemporaries. If the South had at once been
admitted to Congress, its remaining disputes with the North —
slavery being finally abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Con-
stitution, which, by December, 1866, had been ratified by nine out
of the eleven insurgent States, and by eighteen of the Northern
States — would have been re-transferred to the only proper arena for
them, the halls of the National Legislature. There question after
question could have been decided, or at least discussed — ^the very
process which must still bo gone through. It was only postponed
by the Reconstruction policy of 1865.

Let us enter a little more closely into the facts. Mr. Lincoln
had decided on a plan of reconstruction, and it was not changed by
his successor. Ex-Secretary Welles, who was in Mr. Lincoln's
Cabinet, is a conclusive witness on this point. *‘No change of
policy,” he says, took place, nor was there any interruption in the
conduct of public afiairs, by the untimely death of Mr. Lincoln, and
the accession of his successor. Mr. Johnson accepted the situation,
and entered upon his duties with an earnest and sincere desire to
carry forward to a speedy consummation the plan and intentions of
his predecessor for the restoration of the Federal Government to
its full constitutional authorit}^ the States to their rightful position,
the people to their inherent rights, and the Union to all its strength
and beneficence.” ^ What, then, was this policy ? No one can
properly understand the reconstruction period, or the grave events
stiU growing out of it, without having the materials for answering
that question put clearly before him.

President Lincoln gave a sufficiently plain idea of his plans in
his Message for 1864, sent in to Congress on December 8th, 1863.
He suggested, in the form of a Proclamation annexed to the
Message, the terms on which the insurrectionary States •might be
festered to the Union. These terms were simple. A full pardon
was declared for nearly all persons — ^the exceptions did not include
a large class— who had been engaged in the rebellion, and who
would take an oath of fidelity to the government of the United'
StstteA It was also provided that when a number of persons repre*
senti&g not fewer than one-tenth of the votes east at the Presi-
(1) ^per contributed by Mr. Welles to the Oakrxy (New York) of^April, 1S72. '

UNSETTLED FE0BLE3CS OE AUCBBICAN POLITICS.

203

dentiol election of 1860, shall re-establish a State government
which shall be republican, and in no wise contravening said oath,”
then the States should immediatelj enjoy all the advantages possessed
by the other States in the Union. It will be observed that not one
word is said or hinted about changing the sufErage in any of the
States, nor was there any pretence that the Federal Government or
Congress could in any way interfere on that subject. President
Lincoln’s great anxiety then, as at a later period, was to have all the
States back in the Union again as soon as possible. He would protect
the negro in his ncwly*gaincd liberty, but beyond that he would not
go. When Louisiana elected a governor in 1864, the President
wrote to congratulate the new officer, and said : “How, you are about
to have a Convention which, among other things, will probably define
the elective franchise. I barely suggest, for your private considera-
tion, whether some of the coloured people may not be let in, as, for
instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought
gallantly in our ranks. . . But this is only a suggestion, not to the
public, but to you alone.” It will shortly be seen what an immense
distance there is between this position and that afterwards insisted
upon by Mr. Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and the Bcpublican majority.

Arkansas sent a delegation to Congress in June 1864, the election
having been held with the concurrence of President Lincoln. Her
representatives were refused admission. Mr. Lincoln made no
change in his opinions, although his firmness exposed him to attacl^
which warned him that his troubles were not ended with the war.
Had he lived a few months longer, he would either have found his
popularity fast melting away, or he must have submitted to the spirit
which prevailed at the time. He would not listen to any talk about
“wreaking vengeance” on the rebels. He constantly discounte-
nanced the theory that punishment ought to follow victory. On the
very last day of his life, there was a Cabinet meeting at which
he reiterated his sentiments. Secretary Welles has given us an
interesting account of that meeting. Mr. Lincoln spoke of the
recurrence on the previous night of that singular dream which, he
said, hod always visited him just before some important event of the
war. He imagined that he was in a singular and indescribable vessel,
which was moving with great rapidity towards a dark and indefinite
shore. This dream always came before some occurrence of great
moment, and he felt that they would soon get news of Sherman’s
victory over Johnston. He then went on to speak of reconstruction,
and expressed a hope that the insurgent States would get their
governments to work, and return fully to the Union, before Congress
met in December. “ We must extinguish our resentments,” he said,
^'if we expect harmony and union.” “Congress,” he added, “had
nothing ti^do with the State governments, which thePreindeiit could

204 * TOSETTLED PEOBLEMS OF AMEBICAN POLITICS.

recognise^ and under existing laws treat as other States, give them
the same social facilities, collect taxes, appoint judges, marshals,
collectors, &c., subject, of course, to confirmation. There were men
who objected to these views, but they were not hero [/.<?., at Washing-
ton], and we must make haste to do our duty before they come here.''
A few hours afterwards this great man, the wisest of all the American
Presidents, was shot while sitting in a theatre, and his country was
deprived of a life which had never been more valuable than at the
moment it was sacrificed.

The moderate section of the Bepublican party, led by the late Mr.
Seward and Mr. Baymond, w'cre throw'n into a hopeless minority.
The influence of Mr. Lincoln with the people had been great, and it
was now lost to them. Many a time had the quaint jokes and anec-
dotes of the President, his ready address, his invincible good humour,
turned aside the malice of his antagonists. Although, as one who
knew him well has said, ‘^melancholy dripped from him as he
walked," he could always set others laughing; and his stories, if they
were sometimes rather coarse, always carried with them a striking
moral, or some weighty illustration of the subject under discussion.
He was a man eminently fit for the crisis through which he had
to pass. It was not possible for any one else to exorcise his authority
on public opinion. Mr. Johnson was a thoroughly patriotic man,
able and incorruptible ; but ho was a man of Southern birth, and
ftom the first he was an object of suspicion. The Bepublican majority
felt, as Mr. Henry Winter Davis frankly acknowledged in a speech
at Chicago, that they needed “ the votes of all the coloured people,"
and this need was the basis of the reconstruction policy actually
adopted.

The Southern representatives were knocking at the doors of
Congress. They had rescinded their ordinances of secession, and
regular State governments were in existence within their borders.
The Democrats voted for their admission ; but at that time they
only numbered forty-one in the House of Bepresentatives, and while
their votes were recorded as a matter of idle form, their protests
were scarcely listened to. The South declared its anxiety to return
to the Union, and acknowledged its utter defeat. It had no power
to carry on war. General Grant, then Commandcr-in-Chief, made
a report on the condition of several of the Southern States (Dec. 18,
1865), and stated that they were sincerely desirous of obeying the
Government, and to “ return to self-government within the Union as
soon as possible." But on the very same day Mr. Thaddeus Stevens
dedared in the House that the Southern States “ were dead as to all
Wtional and political action" — that they were “doad carcases lying
mlkm the Union." They had “ deserted the garden of Eden," and
" Sowing swords were set at the gates to secure their exclusion.'*

UNSEETLED FBOBLBMS OF AlCEBICAN POUXIGS.

206

A resolution was passed excluding^ for the time, eleven States from
representation in Congress. It was decided that they were not
in the Union, although a bloody war had just been waged to prove
that they were. Not until the 23d of July, 1866, was Tennessee
allowed to take its former position in Congress, and ten other States
were still excluded. In the meantime the conditions exacted from
the South constantly increased in stringency. No one was allowed
to vote for the new constitutions which were demanded, or for the
members of the convention for framing those constitutions, who had
** participated in the rebellion.” All the principal white inhabitants
of the Southern States fell under this disqualification ; for even if
they had not taken an active part in the rebellion, which of them
could swear that he had never given ^^aid or comfort to the enemies”
of the Federal Government ? These were the terms insisted upon by
the 14th Constitutional Amendment, and repeated in the Act of
Congress of March 2, 1867. Even the act of giving a bite of bread
or a cup of water to a passing soldier might suffice to disfranchise
a man under these measures, and debar him from conscientiously
taking the “iron-clad oath” contained in the Supplemental Becon-
struction Act of March 23, 1867.

Thus the work of forming new State governments was thrown
entirely into the hands of the negroes, the crackers — stigmatized even
by the negroes as “ white trash ” — and the carpet-baggers. The
Southern lawyer or justice, the planter or the merchant, could not act
as a delegate to the Convention for revising his State government ;
he could not even vote for the delegates. This was the disfranchise-
ment of almost an entire people. The words of the Act (March 2,
1867, sec. 5) are: — “No person excluded from the privilege of
holding office by said proposed amendment to the constitution of the
United States [the 14th] shall be eligible to election as a member of
the Convention to frame a constitution for any of the rebel States,
nor shall any such person vote for members of such Convention.”
The language of the amendment in question excluded from office
of any kind all persons who had held positions “under the
United States, or under any State,” and who had taken part in the
rebellion, “or given aid and comfort to the enemy.” Now these
were the only persons who, in the condition of Southern society,
were competent, by education, experience, and training, to frame
a system of government on even intelligent principles. Their
disabilities were not removed imtil the new constitutions of their
States had been set in operation. And long after that time the South
was still made the object of repressive measures. In May, 1870,
the first of the so-called Enforcement Acts became law. It was
followed by an additional Act in February, 1871, and hy still another
the following year. There were also the Eu-Klux Acts^ the Oi^

206 UKSETTLEB PEOBLEMS OP AMERICAN POLITICS.

Bights Bills — the last of which was passed in February, 1875, and
has already been declared unconstitutional in more than one court —
and the Force Bill. By the Force Bill, the President was empowered
to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus at any time he felt disposed,
in the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas.
And it proposed to confer this great and dangerous power upon him
for the space of four years. The Bill was passed by the House of
Bepresentatives, but at so late a period of the session that there was
not sufficient time for it to come up in the regular course of business
in the Senate, and consequently it fell through. But the moral
effect of the threatened measure upon the Southern people was
almost as bad as if the Bill had actually become law. It embittered
them afresh towards tlic Bepublican party. It helped to keep the
South in a condition of political excitement, and* to check its slow
progress towards recovery. The war left the entire region stripped
bare of property and money. Capitalists in Hew York or Boston
were not disposed to lend money or give credit to a people who
could offer no security, whose property was never safe, and who were
continually liable to be placed under martial law.

The execrable character of many of the States governments which
growup under these measures, is now better understood by the American
people than it used to be. Correspondents of the Bepublican papers
have repeatedly gone through the country, and all have returned
with the same melancholy story of oppression, misrule, and wholesale
robbery. Enormous taxes were imposed, and when the people could
not pay them, their property was seized and sold at a mere nominal
price to some adventurer from a distance. The debts and liabilities
of the States absolutely grew faster than they had done even during
the war. Thus, South Carolina owed $5,000,000 when the war
ended; in 1872 she owed $39,158,914. Alabama owed in 1865,
$5,939,654 ; in 1872 sho was in debt $38,381,967. The debt of
Louisiana had been run up within the same period from $10,099,074
to $50,540,206. In 1868 Arkansas owed about 3^ million's ; she
now owes close upon 20 millions. These figures are quoted from the
Congressional Bu-Elux report of 1872, and are beyond all question.
They tell their own tale. In May, 1874, the newspapers announced
that ^‘twenty-nine hundred pieces of real estate in Charleston
county. South Carolina,” had been forfeited to the State for unpaid
taxes — ^which was simple confiscation. For the taxes were on such
a scale that the people could not possibly pay them. The local taxes
in some, counties of South Carolina amounted to eight and ten per
nent., and the assessments were fixed at any sum which the negro
rulers pleased. Persons whom even the war had left large owners
of property, were stripped of everything they had. “Their lives
remain,’’ 'says a Bepublican writer, with significant brevity, “their

UNSETTLED PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS.

207

property and their children do not.” Before the war, the taxable
value of the property in South Carolina was four hundred millions
of dollars, and the taxes amounted to $392,000. In 1871 the
taxable property was reduced to $184,000,000, but the taxes had
increased to $2,000,000 — ^aii increase of about 500 per cent.
When it is considered that the wreck of his property which the
Southern planter brought out of the war, has since been confis-
cated for nonpayment of taxes, his present condition may be readily
imagined. Who that has lived in New York has not heard of or
received appeals for the very necessities of life from the repre-
sentatives of the oldest families in the South P There was one well-
known family, rich and distinguished for generations, as Mr. J.
S. Pike says, in his interesting book, The Prostrate State.” House
and land are gone, and the only surviving member of the family
“ poddies tea by the pound and molasses by the quart, on a comer of
the old homestead, to the former slaves of the family, and thereby
earns his livelihood.” It is needless to go any further into the
dismal story, or to describe what has happened under Brooks and
''Poker Jack ” in Arkansas, or under men like Packard and Durell
in Louisiana.

The people of the North now admit that all this misery and wrong,
so far as they are the results of misgovemment, must be brought to
an end. Whether the Democrats will be entrusted with the work
of reforming the grievous abuses which have too long existed —
whether it would be wise or prudent to entrust them with that work
— ^are questions of another kind, and it would be out of place here to
attempt to answer them. It is quite certain, however, that important
consequences must follow to the South from the coming election.
Its demand for justice will be heard. Its losses and sufferings
during the war were brought on by its own acts — it committed the
fault, and it paid the penalty. For many of the evils which have
happened to it since, for the character of its State governments, for
the crushing burdens of taxation laid upon it for the support of the
greatest rogues in its midst, much of the blame has been, and will
be, laid to the door of the Kepublican party. But the Bepublican
party at the North could not always control its followers at^the South
— still less could it guide the great mass of ignorant negroes who
were suddenly taken from the sugar or cotton field, and set in the
chief places of authority. The time has now come when the spirit
of justice which animates the Northern people will require the expul-
sion from the Southern States of the hordes of rascals, Uadc and
white, who have substituted ruthless oppression and pillage for free
government.

Even this review of facts, compressed as it is within the narrowest
limits, will^saffice to rander dear why it is that the Southern vote

208

UKSEITTLED PEOBLEMS OF AMEEICAN POLITICS.

is likelj to be given to the Democratic party. In the North,
there are thousands who will also Tote for that party, because they
are apprehensive of the effects of continued Federal interference in
State affairs. The Democrats arc the hereditary representatives of
the principle of State Rights — ^that principle, which may, indeed,
be pushed to extremes, but which, within proper limits, is essential
to the existence of the Republic. Centralization is not to-day
an idle bugbear. Enforcement Acts, which put absolute powers
into the hands of a United States Marshal, and enable him to call
-upon the United States troops to carry out his orders, may be excused
as " war measures,'' but the Southern communities cannot always be
treated as if they were in a state of war. By means of Federal
interference, fraudulent elections have been carried out, private
rights have been outraged, and entire States placed at the disposal of
men compared with whom Boss Tweed of New York was a model
of integrity. What is to be said of a system of government under
which, just before election day, a United States Marshal dispatches
a body of cavalry into a number of parishes with blank warrants of
arrest, which they serve upon any citizens who may be pointed out
to them by the local politicians or “ loyal " negroes P As if this
method of securing a majority were not enough, the returns on the
following day have been largely made up of fictitious names.^ If it
were not for the fear entertained by the people that the victory of
the Democrats would bo the signal for the ascendancy of Southern
influence in the government, the return of that party to power would
have taken place long ago. For a reverence for the fundamental
principle of the government — the right of States to govern them-
selves — is not confined to the South, or even to acknowledged
members of the Democratic party. It was disregarded by the
Reconstructionists, but it must be restored before the government
can be said to rest on its old foundations.

This is, after all, the greatest of all the unsettled probkms in
American political life. For upon it turn many others, and none
more closely than the treatment of the debt. If the Southern States
had been reconstructed in fact as well as in name ten years ago,
there would be less reason now to fear any tampering with the debt.
They were in a better position in 1865 than they are in 1876
to pay their fair share of it, for they had not been wholly beggared
by the new-fashioned State governments. There was less talk, too,
at that time of demanding compensation for their slaves, although it
is a curious fact that their right to some compensation was often
admitted by men who were justly respected in the Republican party.

(1) The CoDgressional inquiry into the Loniiiiana difficulties, and the speech delivered
in the Senate in 1874 by Senator Carpenter — ^a leading liepublican— on the gawio
subject, are'fuU of fads much more scandalous even than those mentioneU above.

UNSETTLED PEOBLEMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS.

209

This concession formed a part of the plan- for peace submitted to
Jfr. Lincoln by Horace Greeley in 1864. The sum of $400,000,000
in five per cent. United States Stock was to bo apportioned among
the Slave States, pro vatAy according to their slave populations. No
human ingenuity could have invented a proposition less likely to be
accepted by the nation at large. It is well known, however, that
many of the former slave owners or their families have kept a strict
account of the slaves and property which they lost during the war,
and that they intend to put forward a claim for recompense. But it
may safely be taken for granted that the people will never pay a
cent of this claim, and that the party which recognised it would bo
swept out of existence us soon as the popular vote could bo brought
to bear upon it. Yet the dread of having to deal with this emer-
gency is what lias tended more strongly than perhaps any other one
cause to keep the Democratic party out of power. The resources of
the country could not bear the strain which the Southern demand
would lay upon them. It may not always be easy to provide for the
payment of the debt as it at present stands, especially if its manage-
meni is not placed in more competent hands than those of two out of
the three Secretaries of the Treasurj' who have already held office and
retired since General Grant became President. Less knowledge and
intelligence were sometimes applied to the direction of the national
finances than a country store-keeper is obliged to use in his affairs,
if he wants to save himself from ruin. Mr. Morrill, of Maine, the
jiresent Secretary, is a thoroughly competent man, but there is little
encouragement for liirn to devote his nights and days to the harassing
duties of his ofiice, seeing that he is certain to go out of office next
March, and may find it expedient to go long before. A settled or
rational policy becomes almost impossible under this system of
incessant change.

The management of the debt by the Bopublicans has not always
been of the wisest kind, but the party at least deserves praise for
keeping up the national credit through many trying years. Every-
body has felt that while it remained in power, the interest on the
loans would bo regularly paid, and this confidence is perhaps the
greatest force which it has left on its side to-day. The people of
the United States cannot forget that Democratic leaders and Con-
ventions have more than once declared themselves in favour of partial
repudiation. On the 15th July, 1874, the Democratic Convention
of the State of Indiana — presided over by Mr. Hendricks — incor-
porated the following resolution in its platform : “ Besolved, first,
that we arc in favour of the redemption of five-twenty bonds in
greenbacks according to the law under which they were issued.”
On the 13th of the following October, the Democrats carried the
election in this State. In the same year, the Democratic Conven-

VOL. xx.*N.s. p

210 ■ mrSETILED PBOBLEUS OF AMEBICAN FOUTICB.

tions of Ohio and Misaovii adopted precisely similar resolutions.
Indeed, the proposition "was actu^y made a plank in the National
Democratic platform of 1868. During the canvass in Ohio, in August
and September, 1875, two of the Democratic leaders — Mr. Allen and
Mr. Cary — ^went about denouncing the bond-holders as “coupon
clippers ” and “ thieves.” Tho Democrats in Ohio have this year
rewarded the services of Mr. Allen, better known as “Old Bill
Allen,” by putting him in nomination for Governor. The National
Convention of the party, held at St. Louis last month, did not
discuss the financial issue in its platform, but it spoke of the nation'a
leanness to “meet any of its promises at tho coll of the creditors
mtitlcd to payment.” It is possible that some members of the party
in the West may attach a somewhat sinister meaning to the last few
words in the sentence just quoted. But, in order that the case
may bo fairly stated, it is necessary to point out that the only
bonds now offered for sale by the Government — ^the Funded Loan—
arc not exposed to any of the quibbles raised by the Western Demo-
crats. Even “ Old Bill ” has not gone further than to suggest that
the interest on tho five-twenty bonds should be paid in paper,
because it is nowhere specified that it should be paid in gold, and
also that the interest should bo liable to taxation. Now tho Funded
Loan is distinctly made payable by law in gold, principal and in-
terest, and is exempt from all taxation, local, municipal, or national,
^h bond carries this guarantee on its face, and therefore no ques-
tion can ever bo raised with regard to these securities. Thus far,
bonds to the ^ount of five hundred millions of dollars have been
sdd, bearing interest at the rate of five per cent. Another issue of
three hundred milhons at four and a half per cent., and a third, of
one thousand millions at four per cent., have also been authorized
by Congress, but none of these bonds have yet been placed upon the
market. As fast as they arc sold, and the provisions of the law will
allow, the old loans bearing higher interest will be called in, and
the mtire debt— now amounting to about two thousand one hundred
millions— will be so consolidated, that nothing short of wholesale
and utter repudiation can ever affect it.

The people of the United States are constantly acquiring a more

z. management of the debt than ever they

ad ^fore. Although the West holds very little, if any, of it, and
the South not one cent, and the total amount held in the whole
Umon 18 small compared with what is held abroad, still the aggre-
gate Bim invested is yearly growing larger. Banks, insurance
^pames, and other corporations, now keep the greater part of
^ rwerves m United States’ Bonds. Private capitalists have
neen dnven to the samo field of investment by the recent break-
down of .many commensial enterprises, by the doubt hanging over

UNSETTLED PBOBLEMS OF AMEBICAN POLITICS.

211

several important railroads, and* by tbe great fall in tbe value of
real estate, amounting in New York city to from 25 to 50 per cent.
It is needless to point out that the larger the proportion of the debt
held in the United States, the smaller becomes the probability of its
ever being wiped out by the sponge of repudiation.

So far as the authority of the President himself extends, the result
of the autumn elections will not materially affect the question, because
personally Mr. Tilden could be as safely trusted as Mr. Hayes ; but
in these days it is highly important to ascertain what the parfy
wants, for it is the party which dictates a policy, not its temporary
chief. The President is now a functionary of a very different kind
from that which ho was intended to be under the Constitution, or
from what he actually was in the early years of the Republic. He
plays but a subordinate part in the Government. Congress can
easily deprive him of all real power — it did so with Andrew Johnson
between 1865 and 1868, and can repeat the process with any of his
successors. The Tenure of OflB.ee Act, even as modified since General
Grant came into power, leaves the President only a limited discretion
in appointing or changing his own Cabinet. Neither the election of
Mr. Tilden, nor that of Mr. Hayes, could therefore be regarded as
putting an end to all controversy about the debt, for Congress might
at any time take the extreme but effectual step of refusing to vote
an appropriation to provide for the interest. But it is to the last
degree improbable that so disastrous a course will ever be pursued ;
the people of the United States can and will pay their debt, just as
they have done down to the present day, in the teeth of diflBculties-
such as no event short of another war could again bring upon them.

We now come to the Tariff* question, as to which the most ardent
friend of the Republican party must be content to occupy the humble
position of apologist. This is where the Democrats have a decided
advantage over their opponents. The sentiment of the new genera-
tion, and of almost all merchants and business men in the great cities,
is entirely with them ; for they see how injurious to trade the
present tariff is, with its extravagant duties ranging from 50 to
180 per cent, on nearly four thousand various articles of commerce.
The Democrats have introduced a greatly improved tariff this very
year, which is not likely to become law ; but reforms are inevitable.
American shipbuilding is a trade of the past. It used to be said that
it was the Confederate cruiser, the Alabama^ that drove American
ships from the ocean; but there has been no Alabama afloat for
ten years past, and where are the American ships? Under the
fostering influence of Protection domestic trade languishes and
the revenue constantly dedines. In their treatment of the Oiumncy,
the Republicans have not been much more fortunate. In Januaxy^

• p 2

212 UNSETTLED PEOBLEMS OP AMEEICAN POLITICS.

1876, an Act was passed fixing a* day on which specie payments
should be resumed— namely, the 1st of January, 1879— but no
adequate provision has been made for redeeming the legal tender
notes; and the Democrats demand the repeal of the Act, while the
Republicans preserve an ominous silence about it in their platform.
Its repeal would undoubtedly be the withdrawal of a formal pledge,
but it seems impossible now that it can be carried into effect. It
will be a nice point to decide which has done most to bring the Bill to
its grave the coldness of its friends, or the attacks of its enemies.

There is then the controversy touching the public Schools. The
point in dispulo is this — whether the public schools, which are
depended on to do the work of educating the people, shall be kept
up in their present form, or handed over to the control of sects. The
Eoinaii Catholics have raised the question by demanding a share of
the school funds in aid of schools to be placed entirely under their
management. If this concession be made to one sect, why not to
another — to all ? Why refuse to the vast body of Pre8bjd}erians a
privilege granted to the Catholics ? Ex-Speaker Blaine, who has
received such hopeless-looking wounds in the present canvass, intro-
duced, a few months ago, a new Constitutional Amendment into the
House which would put an end to this sectarian dispute. It abso-
lutely prohibits the distribution of money raised for the support of
public schools among any religious sects or denominations. But if
the Catholics keep quiet this year, as prudence will lead them to
do, the school question may not be much heard of, except in Ohio,
where local causes give it immediate imi)ortancc.

Lastly, there is the question of Administrative Reform. It might
be more interesting to dwell upon this if anybody could decide which
of the two parties of the day is in earnest about reform, or which has
either the inclination or the power to deal with it in an effective
manner. It is like proposing the contraction of the suffrage — ^j’’ou
camiot do it without the consent of the very classes who are most
interested in preventing it. A law is to be passed prohibiting mem-
bers of Congress from exercising or applying for any patronage.
But a member of Congress will not vote for such a law, and many of
the people who elect him wish him to dispense patronage, because
they expect to get offices from him, and therefore they will not ask
him to vote for the measure. Of course this is not right ; indeed,
we must all admit that it is very wrong ; but it is the state of affairs
which exists in the United States, as every practical man knows, and
it is most difficult to see how a change can bo made for the better.
Thus far it has stifled all attempts at Civil Service reform, sup-
ported as those attempts have been by many of the most thoughtful

T7N6ETTLED PBOBLEMS OE AMEEICAE POLITICS.

218

men in the Union. Yot what influence have the reformers exercised
this very year upon the nominating conventions? The great
machine is “ fixed ” without regard to them. They arc left out
in the cold. It may be unpleasant to say this, but it is a fact.
We have been dealing in this article with public questions as
they arc ; not as they might bo or ought to be. In a country
where almost everybody hopes to get an office some day or other
for himself, his friends, or his kinsfolk, and where competitive
examinations for all post-office, custom-house, or Trcasuiy officials
would be looked upon as an insult to a free and enlightened people
— on such a field as this the promise of sweeping reforms must be
merely intended to pass away the time. Which of the two great
parties to-day will take the risk of announcing that its followers
shall never receive office, not even a post-office, unless they can
pass on examination, and satisfactorily prove their educational and
moral fitness for the honour? Secretary Boutwell used to say,
“ The idea is not consistent with American institutions;” and perhaps
he felt it all the more because under a system which tested capacity,
he never would have been troubled with the charge of the national
finances. In every State in the Union at this moment, the men who
are working hardest to secure the election of candidates on one side
or the other are the office holders, and those who hope to turn them
out and step into their shoes. If the Kepublicans should say to
these men, ‘‘ You may work as hard as you please, and call meetings,
and go on the stump till you are black in the face, but that will not
entitle you to any office from us. We want moral men, not good
wire-pullers, or rousing speakers at cross-roads. Wo shall give the
offices to the Democrats if they can do a sum or write a letter better
than you.” The result of such a proclamation would bo most
encouraging to Mr. Tilden, who would shortly bo left at leisure to
carry out reform in a spirit more in accordance with the celebrated
principle laid down by General Jackson, strictly followed since by
both parties, and not, it is to be feared, seriously disapproved by the
people at large, or they would have swept it away long ago.

L. J. Jennings.

AN EXOUESION IN FORMOSA.

A BULAVAiiK of islands, single and in groups, protects— like some
great system of natural fortification — the eastern shore of Asia.
Beginning at the southern extremity of Kamschatka, this chain of
advanced woiks extends beyond the Northern Tropic. At first come
the Kurile Islands, then the Japanese group, then the Linschotten
Isles, the Loocliooan Archipelago, and the Meiaco-sima group rest-
ing, as on a flank defence, on the great island of Fomiosa. There
is nothing fanciful in this comparison of the long lino of islands,
that is interposed between the Asiatic coast and the broad expanse
of the North Pacific, to a protective fortification. Behind this screen
the ports of China from Amoy to the Yellow Sea enjoy an almost,
if not quite, perfect immunity from that terrible scourge of the
Eastern seas, the dreaded typhoon.^ Round the right flank of the
line they sweep with unbroken fury, and, repulsed by the lofty
mountains of Formosa, carry havoc and dismay to Hong-Kong and
Macao on the southern coast of China. Thus this great island fills
in the geography of the Far East a position commensurate with its
physical characteristics, and with the interest with which it has long
been regarded.

Few names have been more correctly bestowed. Formosa is
indeed majestic in its beauty. It may be regarded as a fortunate
event in the history of geographical nomenclature that its sponsors
were early Spanish navigators, who inherited a sense of the beautiful
and the romantic with their southern blood. The seas about are
studded with the uncouth patronymics of rival Butch explorers,
which throw into brighter contrast this well-deserved appellation.
A line of Alpine heights runs along the island in the interior. On
the west this splendid range sinks into an extensive plain, fertile and
rich in streams, which has received a multitude of industrious
colonists from the neighbouring Chinese province of Foh-kien.
There these colonists have built cities and have turned the country
into a garden. But where the mountains begin, their occupation
ceases ; and the eastern part of the island, abrupt and mountainous
to the very shore, is inhabited by tribes of savages who still live in
unreclaimed barbarism. The territory in the possession of the

(1) “ They (the t}i)hoons) do not extend into the Formosa Strait There is

only one case on record of their having reached Amoy ; and northward of Formosa they

axe of rare occuirence Eastward of Formosa they extend as far as the Bonin

Islands ^and probahJy right across the Pacific.'’— CAtVio Sea I>irectory^ iii. p. 8. Pub-
lished by order of tbo Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. London,' 1874.

AN EXCURSION IN FORMOSA.

215

Chinese stretches across the northern end of the island from sea to
jsea ; but its extent on the Pacific shore is yery limited^ and may be
eaid to end at the sea-port of Kelung,

Coasting along tho eastern side the voyager is repeatedly struck
hy tho magnificence of the scenery. The central range rises to a
height of above 12,000 feet ; whilst between it and tho water are
mountains of an elevation at least half as great. Their outline is at
once beautiful and fantastic. Domes, and peaks, and waU-liko
precipices succeed each other in striking variety. A brilliant
verdure clothes their sides, down which dash cascades that shine
like silver in the tropical sunlight. Occasionally on rounding a
headland a deep gorge is revealed, and in the shadow cast by
the enclosing heights can be dimly discerned the outlines of a native
village.

A short excursion made into the country near Kelung enabled mo
to see many of the beauties of the island. It was undertaken chiefly
with a view to visit the coal-mines wliich abound in that part, and
to form some idea of the manner of working them and of transport-
ing the coal to tho coast for exi)ortation. As May had already
hegun, and as tho weather was hotter than was pleasant for travel-
ling on foot in the middle of the day, a start was made in the early
morning. Soon after six o’clock I landed with one companion on
the little island which forms the eastern side of the harbour, and to
which Europeans have given the name of Palm Island. On it there
are two villages, one inhabited exclusively by Chinese, and the other
by a mixed race of Chinese and Peppy-hoans, a tribe of natives less
barbarous than their fellows who here, at least, have to some extent
coalesced with the colonists from the mainland.

Our landing took place at the nearest point of tho former village.
On our way we passed several of the inhabitants engaged in fishing
in mmjmns, or Chinese boats, which seemed like rude copies of those
found at Amoy, and at all other places to which the roving
natives of Foh-kicn migrate. We were received by a respectable
concourse of the remaining villagers. It was soon evident that
Europeans were not frequent visitors, as whenever we encountered
women or tho younger children they fled to their houses at first sight of
us. The men, and some dozen valiant little urchins of more mature
perhaps eight or ten years, exhibited no signs of alarm or even
of surprise, and seemed anxious to show us every civility. The
former, in several cases, came forward and oflered us their long
bamboo pipes to smoke ; whilst the latter, with that inexpressible
love of fun so characteristic of Chinese children, did their best to
heighten the terrors of their younger companions by shouting loudly
at any who exhibited signs of fear at our approach.

Pishing villages in any part of the world are seldom remarkaUe

216

AN fiXCUBSlON IN FOBMOSA.

for cleanliness ; and a Chinese fishing-village might be expected to
surpass all others in abominations of sight and smell. This one^
however, of Searle-how seemed an exception to the rule. There was-
a very remarkable air of comfort and well-being about the place.
The boats were numerous and well found. The street was laid
out with a fair amount of regularity. The inhabitants were well-
dressed, and the women, all tottering on their poor crushed feet,,
wore many ornaments. A temple of considerable size occupied a
prominent position, and, strange to say, it was comparatively clean
'and in good repair, whilst, still stranger, an attendant was positively
engaged in sweeping and in generally embellishing the paved space
in front of the central door. Early as it was, voices of small Chinese
scholars learning their lessons came from a wing of the building on
the right. The houses were well built, comfortable, and cleanly.
As a rule one plan was followed. A large central building, generally
of neatly cut blocks of the sandstone of which the island is formed,
ran parallel to the road-way ; from it a wing jutted out at right
angles at cither end ; the whole house thus forming three sides of a
square. In the central building was a largo hall containing, right
opposite the door, the family altar and the shrine of the household
deities. This seemed to be the principal living room of the dwell-
ing ; the wings were chiefly used as storehouses. We were civilly
invited by signs to enter and inspect one of the best of the houses^
and were even tempted by the offer of chairs ; but as we had some*
distance to go, we declined the friendly invitation. In front of the
village was a noble tree, throwing a vast shade around it, under
which the whole village might assemble.

The other village was on the same beach, a few hundred yards
further on. Behind both there was much cultivated land, many
plots being laid out us vegetable gardens and rice-fields. The high
style of Chinese cultivation was everywhere noticeable, as also the
rarer sight of well-kept fences and hedges. The houses^^at thia
latter place were not so largo nor so well-built as those at Searle-how.
Many were constructed of wooden frames filled in with fragments of
coral from the beach, but in design they were almost exactly similar.
Here also in front of the village was a magnificent tree of even
nobler proportions than the other. Its trunk was a gnarled and
knotted mass bound and overlaid with the stems of innumerable
creepers. Beneath a vertical sun it would cast a shadow consider-
ably over a hundred feet in diameter ; whilst so thick was its foliage
that not a ray could penetrate it.

The Peppy-hoan villagers bore some resemblance to their Chinese
neighbours. They had adopted the Chinese dress, and the men had
shaven heads and the regular queue. The women, on the contrary^
dressed 'their hair in a different fashion, tying it up in adoose knot
behind with some bright-coloured cord. Their feet too were bare

AN EXCUBSION IN POHHOSA.

217

and as nature had formed them. They were a tall fine-looking
people. The men had a sturdier^ more manly air than is common
amongst Chinamen^ whilst the women could boast a stature and a
stateliness of figure almost unknown amongst their Chinese sisters.
Handsome faces were not common; their complexions somewhat
resembled those of the lighter- skinned Chinese, though they were
decidedly of a fresher hue than those of the yellow- visaged nation.
The type of feature was unmistakably Mongolian. The island is
separated from the main-land by a narrow strait, through which
there was a boiling tide rushing at the time of our visit. We tried
to engage a boat to cross it, but it was intimated to us by signs that
the owners were away. At length a boat of large size deeply laden
was seen coming through the strait witli the tide. We called out to
the boatmen, and made them understand our wish to be ferried across.
With some little difficulty in that swift current they succeeded in
picking us up, and landing us at a pretty little bay on the opposite ‘
shore. There were four men in the boat, all Chinese. When we
landed we offered them a small sum of money as our fare ; to our
astonishment they civilly but firmly refused to accept it, though
they must have been considerably delayed in their voyage, and two
of them had actually got into the water and stood in it up to their
waists to assist us in landing.

The scenery of the main-land was very fine. Even the views we
had had on our way up the coast had not at all prepared us for it.
The copious moisture of a tropical climate was apparent in the rich
luxuriance of the vegetation. The varied outlines of the heights
which rose on either side told of earthquakes and of a volcanic
region. Inland from the head of the little bay to which we had
been brought across ran a narrow valley, through which water had
at some time evidently forced its wjiy. On each hand were tokens
of a great upheaval. The strata dipped steeply towards the west ;
and the edges of the seams of rock were scored and eaten away by
the action of the water. Yellow sandstone and masses of coralline
limestone abounded. The former exhibited in the little promonto-
ries and points that jutted out into the sea the strangest forms.
Blocks of the soft stone stood upright near the water’s edge, and
here and there they were rounded off and scraped away near the lower
part till they looked like gigantic mushrooms, or huge egg-cups or
wine-glasses, or took some other quaint shape. In some cases so
exact was the resemblance to these objects that it was difiGicult to
believe that art had not been called in to aid nature in fashioning *
them.

The bottom of the valley was laid out in rice-plots. The rice, had
been recently transplanted, and each plant had a clear space around
it^ of several inches. The surifiice of the ground was covered te a
slight depth with water. The brilliant green of the young, rioe

318

AN EXCUBSION IN EOBMOSA.

formed a chaTining contrast to the more sombre foliage of the shrubs
and trees which half hid the steep cliffs on both sides of the valley.
The number and beauty of the wild-flowers were extraordinary. W e
were first struck by a convolvulus of enormous size, of a rich violet
hue striped with crimson, which covered the bank by the side of
which the path ran. Then a white lily of exquisite shape and
delicate perfume delighted us. Orchids of varied colours fringed the
pathway. A graceful creeper with a tiny lilac blossom trailed along
the narrow strip of sward that edged the rice-field on our right. A
cottage or two lay half -hidden behind a hedge of bamboo and screw-
pine, above which waved the graceful leaves of the plantain-tree. A
splendid variety of tree-fern, like a dwarf palm, grew in great pro-
fosion. A variety of willow is a common object in most Chinese
villages, and some of the delicately-leaved trees, which wo met with
in our further progress, bore no inconsiderable resemblance to the
aspen.

At the head of the valley we came upon the sea. A sandy beach
swept round with a wide curve towards the cast, beneath a line of
almost perpendicular sandstone cliffs. Midway along it was a little
hamlet of fishermen’s cottages. Some of the inhabitants were on the
beach repairing their boats and nets. Imitating in pantomimic
action the occupation of coal-miners, we asked, and were readily
shown the way to the pits. Our road lay by the shore beneath tho
cliffs, then round the headland which they formed. A geologist
would have been charmed with the scene laid open to our view. At
the water’s edge were numberless rocky pinnacles, and cup-shaped
masses like those we had already seen. The beach itself was strewn
with boulders in ev^ry stage of formation. Some of the sandstone
stems were so eaten away by the waves that the globular mass on
the summit was ready to fall, others had but recently been broken
off, whilst on the ground lay many rolled about to a greater or less
degree of sphericity. As the path led round the extremity of the
headland, two parallel lines of rock in crystallized blocks, as level
and as regular as a tiled footway, ran out for some hundreds of yards
into the sea. It was tho Giant’s Causeway on a larger scale. These
long and shapely roads, that almost joined the point on which we
stood to another promontory in front of us, were just the edges of
strata tilted up from where tho sea now flows, and inclining towards
tho land. On our right or inshoro hand great sandstone filiffg
towered above us. Superimposed on these was a line of perpendi-
Gul^ Coralline limestone, edged at the summit with shrubs and
creepers, and presenting, with its buttressed projections, and grey
and hoary surface, the appearance of an old castle wall. Indeed, so
closely in this did nature resemble art, that we. were forced to make
a doife inspection before we could get rid of the idea that we were
actually passing beneath ruined walls. The flowers had followed us

AN EXCT7BSI0N IN EOBHOSA.

219

still. The giant convolTulus still shone upon the prominences and
projections of the cliffs ; and the snowy lily grew boldly in clumps
far out on the rocks towards the sea.

More rice- fields filled up a narrow plain which succeeded to the
cliffs. Then the straggling houses and vegetable gardens of a small
village built by the sea-side appeared. The houses came down close
to the edge of a snug and picturesque harbour, and many of them
stood in the deep shadow of noble trees. Junks and cargo-boats
were lying moored close to the shore, and a line of carriers was
descending and ascending a steep hill-path, carrying loads to and
from the craft below. We soon came upon symptoms of a coal-
mining neighbourhood. Heaps of coal, and great masses of slack ’’
and refuse formed a background to tho village between the houses
and the surrounding hills. The carriers, who went and came in an
endless procession, were bearing baskets of tho black mineral, slung
from a pole across their shoulders. The bright verdure, the luxuriant
tropical shrubs, the smooth sandy beach were soiled by the foul dust
from the black heaps that were piled up beneath the bill.

We ascended the path, which was so steep that we almost had to
climb. The carriers, nevertheless, came down it fearlessly and with
sure foot in spite of their heavy loads. At the summit we saw that
tho path dropped into a valley, which it crossed between wet rice-
fields, and then again mounted a ridge on the other side. This we
found, as we went on, was repeated over and over again. In some
places so precipitous was the way, that steps were cut in the soft
sandstone of tho hillside to facilitate the ascent. We encountered
still an unbroken stream of carriers with their loads; though
diverging paths showed that they came from mines in different
quarters.

These continuously succeeding valleys revealed the volcanic nature
of the formation, and wore evidences of violent convulsions. There
was a certain sameness in the features of many. The sides were
abrupt, seldom rising above four hundred feet in height ; the sur-
rounding ridges were sharp and with a broken sky-line, and the low
ground was a kind of floor, flat and level throughout. Yet they
were sufiiciently unlike to give, as we ascended ridge after ridge, a
succession of changing views. The aspect of all was extremely
picturesque. The level rice-fields with their emerald-hued plants
lay like a brilliant carpet beneath our feet. At one side ran a purl-
ing brook, whose murmurs struck softly on the ear. Trees and
shrubs of various tints clad the hillsides, while patches of bamboo
added further variegation to the foliage, and decked the outline of
the heights with groups of graceful forms. The giant convolvulus
still clung to the banks and thicker clumps of shrubs ; but a brilliant
scarlet lily replaced the delicate white one of the sea-shem. C9oser
infection was often disappointing. In the lice-fields, wnlle^ini^

220

AN EXCTJESION IN FORMOSA.

hands and knees, and kneading the liquid mud about the plants,
were Chinese peasants engaged in the revolting rice-culture. By
the side of the streams were huge heaps of refuse coal, which stained
the waters to dinginess. The tropical ^ air was warm and moist, and
fragments of cloud hung about the higher peaks around us. At first
sight these valleys reminded us of sunken craters, such as Agnano,
near Naples, or still more the picturesque peninsula of Uraga in
Japan. Perhaps there is almost sacrilege in the latter comparison,
for in that lonely land, if anywhere, arc

“ More pellucid streams,

An ampler other, a diviner air,

And fields invested with imrpurcal gleams.” -

The road of the coal-carriers was long and troublesome. Carry-
ing a heavy load for at least four miles, as those who came from some
of the mines were doing, up and down steep hills in sucli an atmo-
sphere and such a temperature, must have been superlatively dis-
tressing. Many of them bore a forked stick on which they rested
at their halts — the pole to which their coal-baskets were slung.
These halts were, however, infrequent. Here and there in some
sequestered nook, some umbrageous fold in the hillside, an enter-
prising Chinaman had established a little tea-house, and in front of
it a knot of carriers stopped to refresh themselves. Elsewhere there
were stalls beneath an awning of mats for the sale of sweetmeats, or
bits of sugar-cane.

The mines were worked in a most primitive fashion. A hole, not
much bigger than would be necessary to admit one person, was dug
horizontally into the side of the steep face of a hill. Into this a
miner carried a shallow flexible basket, and when he had scraped it
full, he dragged it out with a rope, and transferred its contents to
the two baskets which the carriers use. The coal was of two descrip-
tions ; a lustrous, black, bituminous sort, and a brittle, dull, yellow
kind which came out in small lumps, and abounded in sulphur and
iron pyrites. The slack and refuse was cast forth from the pit^s
mouth to lie where it might. By this rude method of raising it a
considerable quantity of the mineral is brought into the market. It
is believed that as much as ten thousand tons have been raised in a
single year. A rude estimate of the capabilities of the present
mines, as now worked, fixes the possible out-put at one hundred
tons a day, the actual amount being assumed on fairly good data, as
one thousand pkulOj or about half. The great customers of the
!Kdang miners are the factories and furnaces of the Chinese naval

' (1) Tlie tropic of Cancer crosses the island of FoAnosa.

(2) These lines of Wordsworth (Protesilaus* description of the Elysian Fields) are
not inappropriate in a reflarence to the lovely part of Japan alluded to, wea r Yokosuka
and Kanasawa, as the district goes by the name of the ** Plains of Heaven.'*

AN EXCUBSION IN FQBMOSA.

221

arsenal near Foo-Chow. A considerable quantity also is exported in
junks, for household use, at other ports in China. The Government
has at length become alive to the important source of wealth which
lies hidden in the coal-fields of Northern Formosa. Four English
miners arrived just before my visit to the island, to instruct the
native colliers, and an engineer, who had already inspected the
mines, was in England purchasing the requisite machinery for mining
on Chinese Government account. The local officials had issued a
proclamation desiring the inhabitants to treat the foreigners with
civility ; a mandate which, in the case of a casual visitor — judging
only from my own experience — ^was quite uncalled for. The same
authority has also intimated that the Government only proposes to
open new mines, and not in any way to interfere with the working of
those previously dug.

This will undoubtedly very considerably modify the position of the
aboriginal savages of Formosa. The increase of the commercial
importance of Kolung will mean the extension of Chinese occupation
along the eastern coast. Already, thanks to the action of the
Japanese Government, which nearly caused a war between it and that
of China, a Chinese garrison is stationed at Sauo Bay, some way
south of Kolung harbour. In a few years, probably, those wild tribes,
who have so long i^rcservcd a primeval barbarism on the very borders
of a most ancient civilisation, will be surrounded by patient and
industrious Chinamen, cut off from the sea, and driven to the
mountains of the interior, there to disappear before the Mongolian
race, as the Red men have before the Anglo-Saxon.

At the foot of a high hill, fur up on the sides of which yawned the
black mouths of two coal-pits, out of and into which an ant-like
stream of miners and carriers unceasingly swarmed, stood a little
hamlet of tea-houses, rice-plantcrs’ cottages, and a blacksmith’s
shop. Above it rose a smooth, grassy eminence, which broadened at
the summit to an open down. A fair extent of green sward, placed
thus amidst the dense foliage of the neighbouring hills, heightened
considerably the beauty of the landscape. In front of the village ran
a little stream, across which was thrown a frail bridge of a single
plank, a giddy passage for the laden carriers from the mines. A few
huge water buffaloes were feeding in the valley, and the green sward
was dotted with swine and goats browsing on the shrubs. A wide
plantation of bamboo waved in feathery masses on an opposite
height, and hedges of the screw-pine fenced the village gardens
behind the houses. Up the face of the green hillock, behind the
village, ran our road to the town of Kelung, which the rising
temperature warned us it was time to gain.

From the higher ground we caught glimpses of distant peaks, and
of valleys carpeted with the growing rice. The way, which Utherto
had too often been but a mere track upon the summit of a •narrow

222

AIT EXCUESION IN FOEMOSA.

dyke between water-covered fields^ was now along a well-made
cham&ie^ neatly paved with stones. It led us beneath jutting crags
and eminences crowned with shady copses, and by the side of a
swiftly-running stream. Occasionally it dipped down sharply into
a narrow ravine, or wound gradually up a steep ascent. At length
we descended into an extensive plain ; through it flowed tho stream
we had so long followed, broad and sluggish as a canal. By this
stream much of the produce of the mines is brought into the town,
and at the head of the navigation lay a small fleet of boats, deep with
their sombre cargo. Its banks were so smooth and regular that it
had evidently been “ canalised ” by the industrious people whose
patient toil has converted the surrounding country into a garden.
An opening in the ridge that seemed to block up the end of the
valley enabled us to^^see the masts of the junks lying in the shallow
harbour, and the trees and houses of Kelung. As we approached
the town we walked by primly cultivated gardens, and past snug
homesteads embowered in trees. AVe met strings of people
carrying back their purchases from the tov^Ti, and now and then we
came upon a gaudily painted sedan-chair borne by two men and
carrying a small-footed woman. A little colony of boat-builders
occupied a convenient creek just without the town wall, which was
visible on our left. Above it showed the fantastic gables and
tawdry ornaments of a largo joss-house, or temple, the most
conspicuous building in the place. A sharp turn to the right
brought us past the end of a long bridge, thrown across the stream
just before it falls into tho harbour, and to the low wicket gate which
formed the entrance to Kelung. Arrived within it, we found
ourselves once more amidst the horrors of Chinese streets.

We had yet to go a mile farther, and were glad to hail a Hampau
imd complete our journey by water instead of threading the filthy
labyrinths of tho town. We dropped down quietly in our little
boat, sculled by a single boatman, past a long line of junks loading
and discharging cargo, and landed beneath the ruins of a Smrt on a
low promontory at the custom-house quay. A row of neat
bungalows and a taU white flagstaff, flying the dragon-flag, belonged
to the Imperial Maritime Customs, one of the institutions of New
China which tends perhaps more than any othet to bring her within
the family of nations. Immediately opposite was a largo building
with a high-pitched matted roof, in which was stored the salt
belonging to the mandarins, its sale being a government mono-
poly in China. So that, separated by a narrow strip of water,
stood face to face symbols of the two methods, which perhaps will
soon strive in China for the mastery, — restriction and freedom, the
aiiriient and the new.

Cyfkian a. G, Bridge. .

MR. CROSS AND THE MAGISTRACY.

Last autumn, in this Review, we urged the Government to undertake
a series of large and extensive reforms of the magistracy, and of the
law and practice relating to the summary administration of criminal
justice. We pointed out that there is a great deal to be done,
which, if done, would purify ^and improve the administration of
justice, and so far from injuring or displeasing any one, would
be welcomed by all classes. With respect to the more difficult and
delicate part of the subject, the reformation of the system of appoint-
ment, and the enlargement of the powers of supervision and control,
we urged that Mr. Cross had a golden opportunity for settling a diffi-
culty that threatened to become a burning political question. The
only answer made by Mr. Cross to this latter part of the subject in
his recent speech in the House of Commons was not like himself,
and exhibited feebleness and inconsistency. ‘'With regard to the
counties he believed that the Lords Lieutenant generally made the
appointments fairly ; and the Lord Chancellor was responsible for the
selection of borough magistrates. If they could not trust their Lords
Lieutenant and their Lord Chancellors, it would be rather difficult
to find out persons in whom they could trust.” But Mr. Cross had
himself said just before, “ that in the county with which he was con-
nected, the appointment of the magistrates was at one time extremely
political. He was not blaming one side more than another ; but he
was happy to say that the system had been changed, and that the
appointments were now practically non-political.” In other words,
up to the present time in Lancashire, the Lords Lieutenant and
Lord Chancellors had abused their trust, by subordinating judicial
appointments to political and party motives. Now there is, on the
contrary, much to be said why we should not trust either Lords
Lieutenant or Lord Chancellors. In the first place both are them-
selves political appointments. They are generally active, strongly-
biassed politicians. The Lord Lieutenant is not a minister rei^n-
sible to Parliament, The Lord Chancellor is not in the House of
Commons. The Lord Chancellors have in past years been suspected
of the worst kind of jobbing : and the actual exposures of proceed-
ings that would not bear the light have most certainly discredited that
great office. So much is this the case that it is asserted and firmly
believed that political pressure of no ordinary kind has been brought
to bear on the Chancellor, and has even influenced his appoint-
ment of the superior judges. This may be untrue, or it may be
exagi^rated. But Mr. Cross rested his case on the popular trust in

234 . ME. CEOSS AND THE MAGISTRACY.

l^id Chancellors, and Lords Lieutenant, and this trust does not
exist. And then in answer to his question, where we should find
men whom we should trust more P without hesitation, I say that I
diould put far greater trust in the Home Secretary in general, and
certainly in Mr, Cross in particular. Ho says that the Homo
Secretary is the head of the magistracy. If so, the appointment, the
supervision and powers of rebuke, suspension, and removal, should
rest with him, and not with the Lord Chancellor. The ultimate
solution of this and several other grave questions in reference to the
improvement of our system of criminal justice, is to be sought for
in the creation of a Ministry of Justice, and in the more complete
separation of the administrative from the legislative functions ; a
reform which is certain to come about in time, and seems obvious to
those who stand ajjart, and are not blinded by ofiicial detail, or the
rapid working of the machinery. As a provisional improvement it
would be well to make the Home Secretary responsible for the
appointment and capacity of every magistrate.

If Mr. Cross has laid himself open in his speech to the above
criticisms, we must not forget that he has, nevertheless, taken
up an excellent position, from which he can, if he chooses, bring
in such a large and comprehensive measure as will be sufficient
to settle the question. We are not inclined to grudge the
praises ho bestows on the magistrates. Mr. Cross evidently
takes care not to commit himself. He does not say that there are no
incompetent magistrates. He does not grapple with the real issue of
reformation : namely, that the incompetency of the magistrates has
increased, partly owing to the bad appointments in the past, partly
owing to the immense increase of the w'ork they are now' required
to perform. Before the summary jurisdiction became so enor-
mously extended, the chief duty of the magistrates, in reference
to criminal justice, was the holding of very rough kinds of pre-
liminary investigation, and committing offenders for trial at Quarter
Sessions. But the course of events has brought it to^pass, as we
showed last autumn, that this preliminary investigation, which has
nothing to do with the summary jurisdiction, has become an essential
and much more important part of the criminal procedure : and it
cannot be denied that a part of this work is most inefficiently per-
formed. In truth the magisterial duty is now very difficult and very
responsible. The local magistrates have to perform the same duties
as the experienced and able London stipendiaries. Quantity does
not make up for quality, though the legislature seemed to think so
when it made two justices equal to one stipendiary. We are, how^
not likely to quarrel with Mr. Cross's statement, that there was
* a body of men in the country who acted more honestly, with more
patience with more care, or with a more thorough determination to

HR. CROSS AND THE MAGISTRACY.

225

do what is right than the magistrates of England. They give an
enormous amount of time ; they give infinite trouble ; they get no
thanks.” We may take all this as the introductory gloss to the
really important part of his speech, in which he admitted that
** there were things in the system of the administration of justice
which ought to be altered.” And he further said that out of
140,000 persons who were sent to gaol, about one-third of that
number were sent to gaol not for any crime. They were sent there
because they could not pay fines ; but ho thought that a remedy
might be found for this difficulty.” Over 40,000 persons unneces-
sarily sent to gaol every year ! And then Mr. Cross continues, “ to
say that throughout the country there was any real dissatisfaction
with the decisions of the justices, was an assertion which he could
not for a moment adopt.” What, not the dissatisfaction of the
annual 40,000 ! Is not that real enough P

Still, those who know the admirable quality of the work which a
very considerable portion of our magistracy docs in fact perform,
will candidly admit with us that language like this is not unjustifi-
able ; provided that a really statesmanlike, a wide and enlightened
scheme of reform is contemplated. But Mr. Cross has to separate
the bad, from the good, to weed out the incapable, and consolidate
the useful parts of the present system by a better system of laws and
administration ; he has to infuse new strength, by some scheme for
improving the quality of the whole body of magistrates.

This is not a mere question of administrative reform,. but one
deeply affecting the order, the safety, and the life of the nation.
These words are advisedly used, and are. justified by the most pro-
minent facts in the present condition of the English people. We
pointed out long ago, perhaps with wearisome pertinacity, to Mr.
Gladstone’s Government, the necessity that existed for a root and
branch reform of the Labour Laws, like that subsequently carried
out by Mr. Cross. These warnings they disregarded. They actually
declared that they would not suffer the Labour Laws to become a
great political question. Their refusal to give them their due posi-
tion of importance, their refusal to legislate justly and thoroughly,
was one of the causes, and not the least, which contributed to their
ignominious downfall. Again we offer our advice. Again we warn
the Government not to bo misled by the fact that on this subject
there is no organized agitation. There might be at any moment.
We advocate the speedy settlement of this important subject, and
the removal of a state of things which Mr. Cross admits has given
rise to such deplorable facts as that over 40,000 unnecessary im?
prisonments are infiicted every year. We would have a settlement
without martyrs. The annual 40,000 are enough. But assuredly
if there is to be trifiing and postponement, we shall see martyrdom
VOL. XX. n!s, q

226

MB. OBOBS AND THE MAaiSIBACY.

beg^in and proceedings taken similar to those in the case of the Dorset
labourers, and the more recent example of the banquet and reception
given to the five cabinet-makers on coming out of gaol after the
expiration of their sentence. Nothing could have a worse effect on
the administration of justice than such proceedings.

One of the most important facts of the times, as well as in
relation to this subject, is that a revolution is taking place in
the rural districts: a revolution which, looking to the actual
condition of things, the happy turn events have taken, and the high
character of the men who are leading, ought to accomplish itself
as an orderly evolution of a neglected and down-trodden people
But the agricultural labourers are awake ; they are roused and
animated by new knowledge and new hopes. They are listening to
speeches, reading newspapers, discussing subjects among them-
selves that were never broached before; criticising, examining,
inquiring, learning. The critical attitude and temper is a solvent.
It tends to shatter and destroy, not to create. The labourers are
putting in an appearance where they have hitherto been absent, as
at vestry meetings, asserting rights which they were not even known
to possess. They meet in large crowds and insist with emphatic
voice that their views shall no longer be neglected or despised. So
orderly and peaceable is their behaviour that the danger is lest those
who hold political power should underestimate what is occurring.
Let any one examine the changes that are taking place in such a
direction as that of contract or hiring. He will find that an increas-
ing independence is the one fact. This independence is right, and
all will be well so long as it is supplemented by the proper subordina-
tion to authority. When a Grovemment secs a movement of this
kind taking place, it is bound in duty to take such steps as will help
to guard against the dangers of self-asserted independence, which,
unguided and uncontrolled, tends to become more or less revolu-
tionary and anarchical. Without retreating from what I have said
of the peaceable and orderly character of this movement, its revolu-
tionary character is plainly visible. I have myself heard, and that
from labourers unconnected with unionism, the deliberate opinion
that sooner or later there must be an appeal to force. No doubt such
expressions are exceptional and isolated, and count for very little
at the present time of national quiet ; but they are there. The
political problem stands clearly out. The labourers are determined
to be independent and to be citissens. The only statesmanlike course
is to make them really citizens, obedient to and active in the service
of authority. Give the labourer the franchise, not on the ground of
theoretical ideas of representative government or of abstract right,
but because he has, and not irrationally, got the conviction fii^y
planted in his mind that the vote is the condition ,and symbol of
citizenship. Secondly, offer him a real reform of tho local adminis-

MB. CROSS AKD THE MAGISTRACY.

227

tration of justioe. Seek to make him reverence the law and its
administration. He has long known about the unnecessary punish-
ment of those 40,000 victims with whom Mr. Cross has horrihed us
so much. The laws and their administration in the past, some of the
svils of which are now swept away, have been real tyranny to him.
We have to make him love and revere that which he has thought
oareless, unjust, and tyrannous. These ideas in my mind induced
me to write a series of twelve articles on Our Criminal Justice^
last year in the labourers’ paper, and the very policy I thought it my
duty as one individual citizen to pursue, is the policy for the govern-
ment of this great country. If this question of justice stood alone,
it would still be urgent. Wide and comprehensive legislation
would be a duty pressing upon Parliament and Government, and it
could not be neglected without injury and danger to the State. In
this Eeview we feel bound to continue our efforts and loudly to insist
on this being done, because the Liberal statesmen, absorbed by the
narrowest party movements, have lakcn up an attitude of indifference
and even of contemptuous silence. Eager for Parliamentary
influence and power, afraid of their competitors for the coveted
prizes, anxious not to offend any part of the parliamentary machine,
what care they for questions deeply stirring and affecting the inner-
most life of the people ? For them a masterly inactivity is worldly
wisdom.

The article upon the Reform of the Magistracy in this Eeview was
followed up by an important deputation to Mr. Cross from the
Trades’ Union Congress. They presented a memorial to him, which
after congratulatory reference to tho passing of the recent Labour
Laws, stated their views as follows : —

“Wo theroforo earnostly and respectfully Leg you to take upon yourself the
duty of legislating upon tho summary administration of justice, which, in our
opinion, is most urgently required. Wo think that tho summary jurisdiction
of magistrates has gone too far; that in many crimes of the most serious
description — such, for example, as aggravated assaults upon women, and
children — no sound reason can be given why an accused person should be
deprived of tho right of trial by jury. We cannot but regard such laws as
serious infractions of the most important constitutional right we possess. We
would respectfully point out that no constitutional rule or limit haja ever been
laid down; that the subject has never been discussed by Parliament; and,
lastly, that your own recent legislation, as giving the option of trial by jury,
is remarkable as constituting the first step backwards, from the policy hitherto
pursued of continually extending summary jurisdiction.

“ We do not attempt to offer to you any detailed scheme, well knowing that
such a scheme requires full knowledge of the practical d ftfn.il a difficulties

(1) Our Criminal Justice,’* reprinted by the Oo-operative Printing Society, Balloon
Street, ManoheBter.

Q 2

228

MB. CBOSS AND TEJi: MAGISTBACT.

with which tho question is beset; wo only urge upon you our conviction that
tho laws are in a most unsatisfactory condition, and press with undue and
unnecessary harshness upon tho poorer classes of the communitj’’. We think
that some definite constitutional line should be drawn so as to altor and amend,
or give now moaning to, tho old words of our forgotten charter, ‘ that no man
shall be tried except by his peers and tho law of the land.’ The remedy
would appear to us to lie in the extension of tho plan of giving option of trial
by jury, as in the recent Conspiracy Act, and in several other instances. If
this were tho remedy, summary jurisdiction might safely bo extended still
further. Wo would sdso point out that it would be most desirable that a lino
shotlld be drawn separating more clearly that which is civil from that which is
criminal, which you have successfully accomplished in dealing with workmen’a
contracts. The confiision which still obtains is, wo believe, a source of diffi-
culty, and often an obstruction to justice. Wo are further much stiuck with
the plan of giving security in the Employers and Workmen Act, and wo would
respectfully ask you to consider whether similar provisions might not be
framed, which would afibnl a great relief to tho hardships suffered by reason
of the unnecessary haste and hai'shncss of tho Small Penalties Act, and tho
present methods of enforcing fines and penalties. Wo desire, moreover, to
record our opinion that it would be wiso to reconsider tho whole subject of
imprisonment, whether in respect of unpaid costs, of fines, or by direct
sentence; because imprisonment has become too common, so common that
among largo classes in this country it has ceased to bo either a punishment or
a disgrace.

**In conclusion, we beg to say that the gravest dissatisfaction is felt with
many of tho magistrates, and with tho way in which they have discharged their
duties. This is not applicable to all, but it is so far generally true, that no
reform of tho laws of summary jurisdiction could remove tho suspicion with
which the local administration of justice is unhappily tainted, were it not
supplemented by some remedial measure of appointment and supervision. Wo
would, through you, ask her Majesty’s Government to legislate without delay
upon these important subjects ; but should you bo of opinion that further in-
formation upon the facts and upon the laws is required for legislation, we then
resx'ectfully ask Her Majesty’s Government to institute such inquiry as they
think most likely to conduce to tho ends in view.”

The only answer Mr. Cross gave to this memorial was that there
could not be any real dissatisfaction, because there were so few cases
of appeal from the justices^ convictions ; only 107 in the year 1874.
But the Parliamentary Committee of tho Trades Union Congress drew
up another memorial in answer to this statement, and showed that
these very figures warranted the opposite inference. There were
in 1874, 622,174 summary trials and 486,786 convictiens; of the
107 appeals, no less than 51 were appeals in cases of bastardy orders,
21 by licensed ^dctuallers and beershop keepers. Excluding these
there would be only 36 appeals, or one appeal for every 13,908
convictions. This shows the remedy of appeal to be practically
unused, memorial then continues : —

MR. CROSS AND THE MAGISTRACY.

229

« We boKeve that several causes contribute to this result. There is a belief
among the poor that the appeal from a magisterial conviction Res to the same
body of magistrates, and that if not useless, the chances are against the appeal
being successful. Dissatisfaction with tho summary tribunal has actually
extended (often very unjustly) to the higher tribunal. Tho expenses of appeal
are beyond tho means of a labouring man, who has not substantial friends or a
Trades Union at his back. Costs of successful appeals are alleged to be often
atrangclj' refused. Some of the costs incurred by Unions in supporting suc-
cessful api)oals have been so great as to prevent appeals in all but exceptional
instances. In almost every caso too tho accused must find security or bail for
costs, and an appeal is thereby made impossible. But, in fact, there is no
general right of appeal. In some of the most serious charges there is no appeal,
as in assault. Mr. Oko says, ^ Xo certain rule has boon adopted by the Legis-
lature in conferring this power ; by some Acts it is given, while by others in
analogous cases it is excluded. To tho particular Acts, therefore, resort must
be had to know whether there lies any aj^peal ; and if so by what party, from
what decision, at what time, and in what mode, notice of it should bo given,
and the recognisance entered into, as tho particular provisions governing and
regulating the right must bo complied with, for there is no general enactment
on the subject.’

“ Tho expenses of an appeal upon tho law to a Superior Court may be less
and tho decision more satisfactory, but it is not within the reach of tho poor,
and wo believe that other difficulties of a more technical character will be found
to have prevented tho full usefulness of this valuable protection. Thus wo
eubmit that upon tho important subject of appeal legislation is wanted.

In conclusion, wo beg to call your attention to the fact that in tho year
1874, there wero 93,342 persons sentenced to imprisonment (probably with
hard labour), without trial by jury : of those —

126 were for terms above 6 months ;

3,744 from 6 and above 3 months ;

7,700 from 3 and above 2 months ;

12,291 from 2 and above 1 month; &c., &c., and
1,146 wero whipped.

“These numbers appear to us so largo, and tho powers so great, as to lend
tho most weighty support to our request for an inquiry into the laws relating
to such powers, and into tho way such powers have been exorcised. Wo felt it
to be our duty to bring these additional observations and facts before you. We
only beg to express our belief that you will do what is just, and, therefore,
leaving the matter in your hands,” &c.

So stood matters. These grave and weighty representations had
been re^ectfnlly and publicly laid before the Government. They
had not been answered, save in reject of the appeals, which
answer had been completely refuted. Therefore the Parliamentary
Committee of the Trades Union Congress felt it to be their duty,
and at once determined, to raise a debate on the subject in the
House of Commons. They thought it right and proper, considering
the admirable way in which Sir William Harcourt had advocated the

ME. CEOSS AND THE MAGISTRACY.

2ao

reform of the Labour Laws, to ask him to undertake the conduct
and management of this great and important task. Upon hia
declining to do so, they were wise enough to intrust the work to
Mr. Hopwood, who most faithfully and judiciously discharged the
trust confided to him. On June 16th Mr. Hopwood accordingly
brought the whole subject fully and completely before Parliament,
and succeeded in eliciting a statement and promise of legislation from
the Home Secretary. Wo do not propose to follow Mr. Hopwood
in his speech, which has been reprinted. Mr. Cross appeared unable,
and* at any rate did not attempt, to answer it. Ho declared that ho
was not going to find fault with the speech. Those who heard what
took place or read the verbatim report of the two speeches must be
satisfied that an immense step has at length been gained, for which
Mr. Hopwood deserves great credit. It was a most delicate subject
to deal with, one upon wliich the House of Commons is kno^vn to bo
most susceptible. The speech had, in fact, to be made to the very
body of magistrates it proposed to reform. Hitherto it has been
quite impossible even to bring the subject before the House of
Commons. Whenever it has been attempted, some deviee has been
adopted to prevent the introduction of so unpalatable a topic. The
mere delivery of Mr. Hopwood’s excellent speech in the House
would alone have constituted a great success. But when we
consider the promise of legislation by the Government, that the
subject has become a Government question, and the nature of the
startling admission made by Mr. Cross, and the cordial approbation
given to Mr. Hopwood by the press, we may congratulate ourselves
on having made a very important advance. The result fully justifies
those who expressed their opinion that the question of the Magistracy
should form one of the subjects which the Liberal party must place
in their programme. To reach the stage we have now reached was
the difficulty. The timid, the vacillating, and the calculating
politicidhs who have hung back to see which way the wind was
going to blow, will swell our ranks. Political capital is now fb bo
made. When the recent Labour Laws were passing or passed, what
offers of assistance from members of Parliament poured in upon the
secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades* Union
Congress ! They may now learn that the working classes of the
country really are in earnest about the magisterial question, and
that they will do well to join heartily in the efforts to obtain
justice.

Looking, however, to the position which Mr. Cross has taken up,
the stage which the subject has now reached, there is reason to. hope
that the same fate awaits the magisterial question as befell that of
the Labour Laws. It cannot be doubted that a large and wide
measure of reform would meet with a great approval and support.

KB. OBOSS AlTD THE KAOIBTBACT. 23l.

This would come from yarioos quarters; from the uon*political-~
perhaps the largest body in the kingdom; from those who are
intensely politicfd, and not party-men ; from the working classes ;
and, lastly, from at least an important section of the magistrates
themselTcs. To these latter real reform means a greater facility of
doing justice, a greater trust by the public in the justice that is
administered. Let us express our earnest hope that the Goyemment
and Mr. Cross may see their way to dealing with this subject as its
greatness and importance requires. They haye eyery opportunity
and eyeiy facility for the work. They haye knowledge, ability, and
experience. Have they sufficient insight into what is so clear to
outside spectators ? If not, if they cannot see and will not under
take the duty, such failure, it needs no prophetic vision to foretell,
will be a cause of downfall before long. Mr. Cross admitted with cha-
racteristic frankness that the advocates of reform on the Labour Laws
were only actuated by the desire of obtaining justice. Wo tell
him that this is the case with the reform of the Magistracy and the
summary administration of justice. All that is asked for is simple
justice ; a reformation of the administration and laws of summar}’’
justice; a constitutional law defining the limits of the summaiy
powers of justices of the peace, and proclaiming the exact legal
rights of citizenship in respect to trial by jury. We hope that this
work will bo well and faithfully done at once by those in power,
that it may redound to their credit as statesmen, and prove a
measure of safety in the transitional state of English civilisation
through which we are now passing.

Hemiy Crompton.

A BALLAD OP PAIR LADIES IN REVOLT.

See the sweet women, friend, that lean beneath
The ever-falling fountain of green leaves
Round the white bending stem, and like a wreath
Of our most blushful flower shine trembling through.
To teach philosophers the thirst of thieves :

Is one for me ? is one for you P

II.

-Pair sirs, we give you welcome, yield you place.
And you shall choose among us which you will.
Without the idle pastime of the chase.

If to this treaty you can well agree :

To wed our cause, and its high task fulfil.

He who's for us, for him are we !

III.

-Most gracious ladies, nigh when light has birth,
A troop of maids, brown as burnt heather-bolls.
And rich with life as moss-roots breathe of earth
In the first plucking of them, past us flow
To labour, singing rustic ritoriiolls :

Had they a cause ? are they of you ?

IV.

—Sirs, they are as unthinking armies arc
To thoughtful leaders, and our cause is theirs.
When they know men they know the state of war :
But now they dream like sunlight on a sea.

And deem you hold the half of happy pairs.

He who's for us, for him are we I

-Ladies, 1 listened to a ring of dames ;

Judicial in the robe and wig ; secure
As venerated portraits in their frames ;

And they denounced some msurrection new
Against sound laws which keep you good and pure.
Are you of them P are they of you P

A BALLAD OF FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT.

2H3

VI.

— ^SirS;, they arc of us, as their dress denotes,
And by as much : let them together chime :
It is an ancient bell within their throats.
Pulled by an aged ringer ; with what glee
Befits the yellow yesterdays of time.

He who's for us, for him are we !

VII.

— Sweet ladies, you with beauty, you with wit ;
Dowered of all favours and all blessed things
Whereat the ruddy torch of Love is lit ;
Wherefore this vain and outworn strife renew,
\Vhich stays the tide no more than eddy-rings P
Who is for love must be for you.

VIIT.

— ^The manners of the market, honest sirs,

'Tis hard to quit when you behold the wares.

You flatter us, or ijerchance our milliners
You flatter ; so this vain and outworn She
May still be the charmed snake to your soft airs !

A higher lord than Love claim we.

IX.

-One day, dear lady, missing the broad track,

I came on a wood's border, by a mead.

Where golden May ran uj) to moted black :
And there I saw Queen Beauty hold review.
With Love before her throne in act to plead.

Take him for me, take her for you.

X.

-Ingenious gentleman, the tale is known.

Love pleaded sweetly : Beauty would not melt :

She would not melt : he turned in wrath : her throne
The shadow of his back froze witheringly.

And sobbing at his feet Queen Beauty Imelt.

O not such slaves of Love are we !

234

A TlATXAn OF FAIB XADIES IN KEYOLT.

XI.

-Xiove, lady, like the star above that lance
Of radiance flung by sunset on ridged cloud.

Sad as the last line of a brave romance ! —

Young Love hung dim, yet quivering round him thre^r
Seams of fresh fire while Beauty waned and bowed.

Scorn Love, and dread the doom for you.

XIT.

— Called she not for her mirror, sir ? Forth ran
Her women : I am lost, she cried, when lo !

Love in the form of an admiring man
Once more in adoration bent the knee
And brought the faded Pagan to full blow :

For which her throne she gave : not we !

XIII.

-My version, madam, runs not to that end.

A certain madness of an hour half past.

Caught her like fever : her just lord no friend
She fancied ; aimpd beyond beauty, and thence grew
The prim acerbity, sweet Love's outcast.

Great heaven ward off tliat stroke from you t

XIV.

-Tour prayer to heaven, good sir, is generous :

How generous likewise that you do not name
Offended nature ! She from all of us
Couched idle underneath our showering tree.

May quite withhold her most destructive flame ;

And then what woeful women we I

XV.

— iQuite, could not be, fair lady ; yet your youth
May run to drought in visionary schemes :

And a late waking to perceive the truth,

- When day falls shrouding her supreme adieu.

Shows darker wastes than unaccomplished dreams :

And that may be in store for you.

A BALLAD OF FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT.

235

XVI.

-O sir^ tlio truth, the truth ! is ^t in the skies.
Or in the grass, or in this heart of ours P
But O the truth, the truth ! the many eyes
That look on it ! the diverse things they see.
According to their thirst for fruit or flowers !

Pass on : it is the truth seek we.

XVIT.

"Lady, there is a truth of settled laws
That down the past burns like a great watch-flre.
Lot youth hail changeful mornings ; but your cause.
Whetting its edge to cut the race in two.

Is felony : you forfeit the bright lyre.

Much honour and much glory you !

XVIII.

-Sir, was it glory, was it honour, pride.

And not as cat and serpent and poor slave.
Wherewith we walked in union by your side P
Spare to false womanliness her delicacy.

Or bid true manliness give ear, we crave :

In our defence thus chained are we.

XIX.

-Yours, madam, were the privileges of life
Proper to man’s ideal ; you were the mark
Of action, and the banner in the strife :

Yea, of your very weakness once you drew

The strength that sounds the wells, outflies the lark :

Wrapped in a robe of flame were you I

XX.

"Your friend looks thoughtful. Sir, when we were chill.
You clothed us warmly ; all in honour I when
We starved you fed us ; all in honour still :

Oh, all in honour, ultra-honourably !

Deep is the gratitude we owe to men.

For privileged indeed were we !

236

A BALLAD OF FAIB LADIES IX BEYOLT.

XXI.

— You cite exceptions, madam, that are sad.

But come in the red struggle of our growth.
Alas, that I should have to say it ! bad
Is two-sexed upon earth : this which you do,
Shows animal impatience, mental sloth :

Man monstrous, pining seraphs you !

XXII.

-I fain would ask your friend .... but I will ask
You, sir, how if in place of numbers vague.

Your sad exceptions were to break that mask
They wear for your cool mind historically.

And blaze like black lists of a tainting plague P
But in that light behold them we.

XXIII.

-Your spirit breathes a mist upon our world.

Lady, and like a rain to pierce the roof

And drench the bed where toil-tossed man lies curled

In his hard-earned oblivion ! You are few.

Scattered, ill-counselled, blinded : for a proof,

I have lived, and have known none like you.

XXIV.

— Wo may be blind to men, sir : we embrace
A future now beyond the fowler’s nets.

Though few, we hold a promise for the race
That was not at our rising : you are free
To win brave mates ; you lose but marionnettes.

lie who’s for us, for him are we.

XXV.

-Ah ! madam, were they puppets who withstood
Youth’s cravings for adventure to preserve
The dedicated ways of womanhood P
The light which leads us from the paths of rue.

That light above us, never seen to swerve.

Should be the home-lamp trimmed by you.

A BALLAD OF FAIB LADIES IN BEYOLT.

237

XXVI.

-All ! sir, our worshipped posture we perchance
Shall not abandon, though we see not how.

Being to that lamp-post fixed, we may advance
Beside our lords in any real degree.

Unless we move : and to advance is now

A sovereign need, think more than we.

xx■^^I.

-So push you out of harl)our in small craft.

With little seamanship; and comes a gale.

The world will laugh, the world has often laughed.
Lady, to see how bold when skies are blue.

When black winds churn the deeps how panic-pale.
How swift to the old nest fly you !

xxvin.

-What thinks your friend, kind sir P We have escaped
But partly that old half-tamed wild beast’s paw
Whereunder woman, the weak thing, was shaped :

Men too have known the cramping enemy
In grim brute force, whom force of brain shall awe :
Him, our deliverer, await wo !

XXIX.

-Delusions are with eloquence endowed.

And yours might pluck an angel from the spheres
To pky in this revolt whereto you arc vowed,
Ddiverer, lady ! but like summer dew
O’er fidds that crack for rain your friends drop tears.
Who see the awakening for you.

XXX.

— Is he our friend, there silent P he weeps not.

0 sir, ddudon mounting like a sun
On a mind blank as the white wife of Lot ;

Giving it warmth and movement ! if this be
Ddusion, think of what thereby was won

For men, and dream of what win we.

288

A BALLAJD OF FAIB LADIES IN BJBTOLT.

XXXI.

—Lady, the destiny of minor powers,

Who would recast us, is but to convulse.

You enter on a strife that frets and sours ;

You can but win sick disappointment’s hue ;

And simply an accelerated pulse,

Some tonic you have drunk moves you.

XXXII.

—Thinks your friend so P Good sir, your wit is bright
But wit that strives to speak the popular voice.

Puts on its nightcap and puts out its light :

Curfew, would seem your conqueror’s decree
To women likewise : and we have no choice
Save darkness or rebellion, wo !

XXXIII.

— plain safe intermediate way is cleft
By reason foiling passion : you that rave
Of mad alternatives to right and left,

Echo the tempter, madam : and ’tis due
TTnto your sex to shun it as the grave.

This later apple offered you.

XXXIV.

— This apple is not ripe, it is not sweet ;

Nor rosy, sir, nor golden : eye and mouth
Are little ■wooed by it ; yet we would eat :

We are somewhat tired of Eden, is our plea :

We have thirsted long : this apple suits our drouth :

’Tis good for men to halve, think we.

XXXV.

— ^But say, what seek you, madam ? ’Tis enough
That you should have dominion o’^er the springs
Domestic and man’s heart : those ways, how rough,
now vile, outside the stately avenue
Where you walk sheltered by your angel’s wings.
Are happily unknown to you I

A BALLAD OF FAIB LADIES IN EEYOLT.

XXXVT.

—We hear women^s shrieks on them. We like your phrase^
Dominion domestic ! And that roar,

* What seek youP' is of tyrants in all days.

. Sir, get you something of our purity.

And we will of your strength : we ask no more.

That is the sum of what seek we.

XXXVII.

-O for an image, madam, in one word,

To show you as the lightning night reveals,

Your error and your perils : you have erred
In mind only, and the perils that ensue
Swift heels may soften ; wherefore to swift heels
Address your hopes of safety you !

XXXVIII.

-To err in mind, sir .... your friend smiles : he may I
To err in mind, if err in mind we can.

Is grievous error you do well to stay.

But O how different from reality
Men’s fiction is ! how like you in the plan.

Is woman, knew you her as we !

XXXIX.

-Look, lady, where yon river winds its line
Toward sunsei., and receives on breast and face
The splendour of fair life : to bo divine,

’Tis nature bids you be to nature true.

Flowing with beauty, lending earth your grace.
Reflecting heaven in clearness you.

XL.

-Sir, you speak well : your friend no word vouchsafes.
To flow with beauty, breeding fools and worse.
Cowards and worse : at such fair life she chafes
Who is not wholly of the nursery,

Not of your schools : we share the primal curse ;
Together shake it off, say we I

A BALIAD OF FAIB LADIES IN JtEVOLT.

XLI.

— ^Hear, then, my friend, madam ! Tongue-restrained he stands
Till words are thoughts, and thoughts, like swords enriched
With traceries of the artificer’s hands.

Are fire-proved steel to cut, fair fiowers to view.

Do I hear him P Oh, he is bewitched, bewitched !

Heed him not ! Traitress beauties you I

XLII.

— ^W e have won a champion, sisters, and a sage !

— Ladies, you win a guest to a good feast !

— Sir spokesman, sneers are weakness veiling rage.

— Of weakness, and wise men, you have the key.

— Then ai^ there fresher mornings mounting East
Than ever yet have dawned, sing we

XLllI.

— False ends as false began, madam, be sure !

— ^What lure there is the pure cause purifies !

— ^Who purifies the victim of tho lure ?

— That soul which bids us our high light pursue.
—Some heights are measured down : tho wary wise
Shun Hcason in the masque with you !

XLIV.

— Sir, for the friend you bring us, take our thanks.

Yes, Beauty was of old this barren goal ;

A thing with claws ; and brute-like in her pranks I
But could she give more loyal guarantee
Than wooing wisdom, that in her a soul

Has risen P Adieu : content are we I

XLT.

Those ladies led their captive to the flood’s
Green edge. He floating with them seemed the most
Fool-flushed old noddy ever crowned with buds.
Happier than I ! Then, why not wiser too P
For he that lives with Beauty, he may boast
His comrade over me and you.

A BALLAD OF FAIR' LADIES IN EEVOLT,

241

XLVI.

Have wpmcu nursed some dream since Helen sailed
Over the sea of blood the blushing star,

That Beauty, whom frail man as Goddess hailed.

When not possessing her (for such is he !),

Might in a wondering season seen afar,

Be tamed to say, not ^ I,* but ' we

XLVir.

And shall they make of Beauty their estate,

The fortress and the weapon of their sex ?

Bhall she in her frost-brilliancy dictate.

More queenly than of old, how we must woo.

Ere she will melt ? The halter’s on our necks.

Kick as it likes us, I and you !

XLVin.

Certain it is, if Beauty has disdained

Her ancient conquests, with an aim thus high ;

If this, if that, if more, the fight is gained.

But can she keep her followers without fee ?

Yet ah ! to hear anew those ladies cry.

He who’s for us, for him are we !

George Meredith.

TOL. XX. v.s.

HARTMANN^S PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

Amoxo the bold exploits of philosophical speculation the writings
of Edward von Hartmann must surely always hold a distinguished
place. At a time when metaphysical speculation is eyed askance
with a good deal of suspicion, if not with contempt, by the larger
part of the thinking world, one hears that a youth of twenty-seven
has hurled forth, with careless, jaunty air, a system of ontology
which claims to possess a scientific certainty. A young Berliner of
aristocratic associations, who has passed a good part of his adolescence
in military surroundings, appears to have been called by an in-
scrutable Providence to reinstate metaphysics in the position from
which impetuous science has sought to expel her.

The Philosophy of the Unconscious courageously addressed itself
with words of correction and enlightenment to three distinct classes,
namely, the metaphysicians, the savants, and the theologians.
Imbued with much of Schopenhauer’s contempt for the philosophy
of the chairs, Hartmann charges all previous metaphysicians with
neglecting the certain inductive methods of science in favour of
the unverifiable procedure of d priori deduction. In the same
breath he virlually rebukes the modest positive temper of men of
science, by declaring that their own inductive methods lead to
“ speculative results,” and by re-affirming the necessity of that tele-
ological interpretation of phenomena, that search for final causes,
which they had so long striven to banish from scientific investiga-
tions. By this last utterance, further, Hartmann quite as distinctly
addressed the theologians, teaching them that design is not only
discoverable in a few things in nature to be carefully rummaged out
like a geologist’s rare specimens, but is equally manifested in all
natural processes.

And what impression, it may be asked, has this singular achieve-
ment in speculation produced in the minds of these three classes ? It
seems that among the theologians some few have hailed Hartmann’s
attempt to re-assert the existence of a mental principle in the world’s
order in the face of rampant materialism and the mechanical method
of interpretation, but the greater part appear to discern that
the author takes away more than he gives. If they had been in
any doubt before, his recent work, “ Die Selbstzersetzimg des Chris-
tottthums,” could hardly leave them in any further uncertainty.

Again, are the professional phUosophera recognising the status of
this new metaphysician P One or two, like Zeller and Erdmann, do
indeed jSind a spare niche for him in their histories, but they are

HARTMANN’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. 243

careful to say little about his real philosophic claims. For the rest,
there is a somewhat ominous silence among the really qualified, as
though they were still eyeing the newcomer askance, if indeed they
have not learnt to look on him with a gentle smile.

Then finally as to the savants or nature-searchers, as they like to
style themselves, do they dutifully accept the corrections of the new
teacher, and forthwith commence to enlarge their view of the scope
of scientific induction ? Here we find a yet more ominous measure
of silence, which is only broken now and then by a voice not too
submissive in tone. It looks as if the cautious men were after all u
little reluctant to take the “ inductive leap proposed to them.

Yet there is the fact that the new philosophy circulates, moving
swiftly round a wide orbit ; for the bulky volume which encloses it
has already run through six editions, and there is a promise of
another and larger edition presently.^ Von Hartmann is a figure in
(lerman literature just now, and he has considerably assisted his
many admirers to conceive this figure in a sufficiently concrete
manner by prefixing a vignette of his features to his ponderous
treatise, and quite recently by a detailed account of his life, which
includes, among other interesting matters, the name of the physician
who helped to land him on the shore of this mundane existence.
There is a Hartmann party in Germany, just as there is a Wagner
party, fired with a like enthusiasm. The reconciler of Hegel and
Schopenhauer is, for the moment at least, a popular autlior, and
rigorous scientific method, even when leading to the abstrusest
of results, is at length applauded by the many.* Such an unpre-
dictable effect is surely worth inquiring into.

I.

From the short autobiography already alluded to, and which
appeared under the title, ‘‘My Course of Development” (“Mein
Kntwickelungsgang”), in the first three numbers of the “Gegen-
wart” for 1875,® we gather the following facts.

(]) This edition, which falls into two volumes, has reached the public since the
present essay was finished.

(2) That Ilartmann has produced his effect almost exclusively in literary as opposed
to philosophic and scientific circles, may he seen by a comparison of the favourable
criticisms collected under the heads, ** Philosophic, llieologic, and Literary Opinions,"
which the publishers have just sent out in announcing a new ^tion of Hartmanirs
work. The total absence of aeientijic judgments, and the cold and guarded tone of tho
recognition of the few philosophers, curiously contrast with the abundance and
fervour of the notices drawn from political and literary journals.

(3) Just republished in a volume, entitled “Gesammelte Slndien und Aufsatzo
gomoinverstkndlichen Inhalts.’ ’ The writer of an exceedingly interesting article on
** The Philosophy of Pessimism," in tlio January number of the Westminster JReview
(which has appeared since the present article was written), reproduces one or two
common rumours respecting Hartmann’s life which this autobiography plainly
eqntradicts.

R 2

244 HAETMANN^S PHILOSOPHY OP THE UNCONSCIOUS. '

Carl Bobert Edward yon Hartmanii (the first two praonomena are
not used by the writer) was born at Berlin in the year 1842. His
father was a captain in the Prussian Artillery. Edward was the
only child, and, being naturally precocious, readily acquired an old-
fashioned manner of thought and expression. He went through the
excellent school course of the Prussian Gymnasia, not, however,
* with very much enjoyment. The youth^s precocity is well illus-
trated by the fact that he was able to see, even at this time, the one-
sidedness and narrowness of much of school tuition. He felt school
to:be “a pressing burden,” and rebelled against a system of
instruction that was in many particulars a clear waste of time.”
The hour in which he left school was perhaps the happiest of his
life.” One reason of this curious oppressiveness of school life was
clearly the want of pleasant companionships. Hartmann speaks of
his comrades as looking on him as something uncanny, largely
because of his freedom from all sentiments of piety towards authority.
He had no great love for classical studies. Mathematics and
natural science (what amount of the latter was studied is not
mentioned) were his favourite pursuits. The real sources of pleasure
in this apparently unjoyous existence were English novels and, later
on, the pursuit of music and painting, in each of which branches of
art he attained considerable progress.

On leaving school Hartmann was in a good deal of doubt
respecting a profession. Ho shrank from the prospect of a uni-
versity career on account of the coarseness and vulgarity of student
life. (One would like to know how many German Gymnasiasts are
troubled by similar scruples.) He was not sufficiently sure of a
first-rate success to take up as a calling either of his favourite
arts or natural science. He decided for the army, believiug that by
becoming a soldier he could best become a whole man.” His
mathematical and physical studies, moreover, drew him more espe-
cially to the department of artillery. In 1858 he joined a regiment
of artillery as cadet, and began to attend the lectures and exercises
of the artillery school. His new life appears to have been more
congenial to him than his school experiences, though it is clear that
he found but little sympathy in his special aims among his light-
hearted comrades. He secured ample time for reading, which
embraced works on philosophy, natural science, and sesthetical
siibj^ts. His philosophical reading, which now became more and
more the absorbing interest of his leisure, was carried on at first in
a desultory, afterwards in a more systematic, fashion. For the most
part, lie tells us, he was led by a certain natural instinct in finding
out what was of value in philosophical literature, though he had
ihe guidance of some medical friends in the perusal of works on
psychology.and natural science.

haetmann’s philosophy op the unconscious. 245

Still more remarkable than his early appetite for philosophic lite-
rature was his precocious impulse to think out metaphysical pro-
blems for himself. lie tells us that in his thirteenth year he had
begun to jot down thoughts, questions, doubts, and aphorisms, and
that at the close of his gymnasium course (in his seventeenth year)
he composed his first connected work, under the title ^'Beflections
on Mind,” in which he discussed, inter alia^ the problems of a future
state, free-will, &c. During the first years of his military carper
(1858 — 1863) his professional duties left him too little time for phi-
losophical production. In 1863, he tells us, he laid down some of the
fundamental pillars of his philosophical system, including the recon-
ciliation of pessimism and optimism, and the justification of the
teleological method.

In the winter of 1861—2 his military studies were interrupted by a
disorder in the knee, which, as it grew worse, necessitating long
absences at baths, finally compelled him to relinquish his career. He
left the artillery school in the year 1862, and fully gave up his
profession in 1864. The malady from which he sufiered has remained
a local one, not impairing his general health, and has now consider-
ably abated.

After some further thoughts of taking up the art of painting or
of musical composition as an avocation, Hartmann decided to throw
himself into philosophy,^ and towards the end of the year 1864 he
had already begun his Philosophy of the Unconscious.” In this,
as in earlier productions he went to work, he says, impelled only by
a desire to satisfy his own intellectual cravings for truth, and by no
consideration of external consequences. He attaches much importance
to the fact that his productions were not controlled by any external
ends, whether personal or material.” In this respect, he adds —

The * Philosophy of the Unoonscious’ is specifically distingui^cd from most
productions of tho modern philosophic book-market, which servo either as a
ground-work for an intended university examination, or as a means of gaining
a professorship, or as a confirmation of a professorial reputation, or finally as
a literary investment.’’

He also congratulates himself, in terms which perhaps hardly
seem suitable, at least to English taste, that. this work was under-
taken in perfect isolation from professional circles, and what he
stylos the philosophy of the guild {ZunftphiloBophie).^ The perfect

(1) One almost admires Hartmann’s frank vanity, when he tells us that at this time ** he
knew that in his past twenty-two years he had experienced more, trinmph'ed over more-
errors, got rid of more prejudices, and seen through more illusions, than many cultivated
men are allowed to do in their whole life.”

(2) Hartmann is frequently styled Doctor, and Erdmann, in his ‘‘Grundriss der
IGlosehichte der Philosophic, ” says ho took his doctorate at the Berlin University in the
year 1S67. But Hartmann does not mention this, and, moreover, seems never to have
assumed the title.

246 HAETMANN^S PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

originality and independence of his speculations are vouched for, he
thinks, by the fact that among his friends there was none with whom
he could hold a conversation of any philosophical complexion/'

By the year 1867 the work was completed, though it was not
published till 1869/ The author concludes his autobiography by
* jiving his reason for not substantially changing the first draft of his
system in later editions, and by meeting the suspicion that his pessi-
mistic procUvities ore due to a gloomy personal experience by moans
of a pleasant little sketch of his home life, lit up with the presence of
a sympathetic wife, of a beautiful engaging boy, ‘‘just experimenting
with the joining together of verbs and nouns," and of a few congenial
friends.

II.

With this knowledge of the author’s character and history, let us
look into the stout volume which encloses the “ Philosophy of the
Unconscious," in order to sec what its main features and fundamental
ideas really are. After this w'e shall be in a position to estimate,
roughly at least, the philosophic value of the system, and may then
briefly consider the larger question of its literary success.

In the introduction Herr von Hartmann gives us a fairly
clear notion of the aim of his volume. Setting out with a
quotation from Kant as to the existence of mental representations or
ideas ( Vorstelhmgen) of which we are not conscious, the author seeks
to define his fundamental conception of an unconscious mental pro-
cess which presents itself now as volition (as in instinct), now as
intellectual representation or idea (as in many forms of memory). It
is added that the metaphysical conception of the Unconscious, which
is to include both imconscious will and unconscious idea, is positive
as well as negative, by right of the two attributes volition and
representation.

The author further discusses the right method of speculatioi^, Ho
complains that science has remained too confined and honiCf through
want of a metaphysical interpretation of its conclusions ; while philo-
sophy, by employing only the deductive method, has remained thin
and unsubstantial, and incapable of connecting itself with the fruits
of empirical research. The proper method is to combine the two, by
seeking to connect according to the inductive method the specu-
lative principles" (which have been arrived at by “ a leap in the air
of a mystic nature ") “ with the highest attained results of inductive
science.. *

' (1) It may be intcreBting to compare Hartmaxm'fl age mth those of two other young
miAbB^yBioianB when they published their first great work. Berkeley was twenty -five
when tile ‘*^ew Theory of Vision" appeared;, tho Treatise of Human Hature"
was publi^ed when Hume was twenty-six. •

HARTMANlfl^S PHILOaOFHY OF THE UNCOESCIOVS. 247

After a review of what he calls his predecessors in philo-
sophy and in science in reference to the notion of the Unconscious,
and a highly curious section on the mode in which wc accept the
existence of ends or aims in nature, the writer enters on the first of
the three main divisions of his work, namely, that which discusses
the manifestations of the Unconscious in organic and principally in
animal bodies. * This part, as well as the succeeding one, professes to
be a rigorous scientific investigation of facts, and serves to form the
empirical basis of the metaphysical theory of the Unconscious. The
drift of this investigation is, that everywhere in the processes of
organic life the action of unconscious will and intelligence is distinctly
recognisable. This is shown to hold good in the region of the func-
tions of the spinal column and sympathetic ganglia, in voluntary and
reflex movements, in instinct, in the healing processes of the organism,
and finally in the growth and formation of organic structure. Under
these heads the writer collects from a large number of different
sources a host of curious and interesting facts, which in his view
clearly point to the operations of unconscious will and idea as their
only adequate cause. Without trying to follow him in detail, we
may give one or two examples of his mode of reasoning from these
biological phenomena.

For example, Hartmann quotes a good many well-known facts
which go to show that there are certain movements carried on by
the lower centres in the spinal column and medulla oblongata quite
independently of the brain. Thus a hen from which Flourens
removed the whole of the cerebrum stuck its head under its wing On
going to sleep, and on waking shook itself and arranged its feathers
with its beak. (The writer can scarcely mean that only the column
and the medulla were concerned in these actions.) From these facts
he reasons, as Mr. Lewes and others have d6ne, that animals have
more than one consciousness ; namely, a cerebral consciousness which
is the animal’s self, and detached consciousnesses connected with the
lower centres. In other words, there exist in our bodily organisms
distinct wills which, as far as wc, the higher consciousnesses, are con-
cerned, are unconscious. But more, not only can lower centres of con-
sciousness be proved to exist in the animal organism, we may detect
the presence of distinct mental elements which do not enter as factors
either into the higher cerebral consciousness or into the lower gang-
lionic consciousnesses. This is shown in the execution of voluntary
movements: When I wish to lift my little finger, says Hartmann,
the molecular vibrations which sustain this mental state (Hartmann
calls it a representation) are located in the cerebrum, and cannot there-
fore act directly on the extremities of the motor nerves which lead
to the muscles of the finger, since these are seated in the medulla or
cerebellum. N’or is it possible to explain by mechanical processes

248 ^ HAETlCAim^S PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS^,

the transferrence of these cerebral vibrations to. the motor nerves,.
Hence there must bo an intermediate psychical process which ie
evidently an unconscious one. In consequence of the conscious inten-
tion to lift the finger there arises an unconscious intention to excite-
the point p where the motor nerves end. This intention, moreover,
clearly involves the presence of an unconscious mental representa-
tion, namely that of the point p; consequently, “Every voluntary^
movement presupposes the unconscious representation of the position
of the corresponding nervous terminations in the brain (p. G7).

In the phenomena of instinct Hartmann finds a much wider
field for this action of unconscious mind. Instinctive actions
cannot, he thinks, bo explained as conscious processes, carried out
with conscious intention. The rapidity and certainty with which
they are executed sharply mark them off from the clearly conscious
actions of the same limited minds, these actions being always slow,,
hesitating, and awkward. Nor can they be explained on any
mechanical theory of nervous structure and nervous action as purely
material processes. They clearly involve mental processes; and since
these arc not conscious — ^not even elements of a presumable lower
isolated consciousness in a less complex ganglionic centre — ^they
must result from a will and an intelligent conception which are in
every sense unconscious. This unconscious intelligent will, though
not having any definite material basis or seat in the organism like
the conscious will of the cerebrum and the wills of the lower
centres, is nevertheless to be regarded as belonging to the indivi-
dual. It springs “ out of the innermost nature and character ” of
the individual. The aim of each of these instincts “ is not thought
out by some foreign mind outside the individual as a Frovidence ....
but is willed in every case by the individual, only unconsciously
(p. 97). Under instinct, it may be added, the author renders very
prominent all cases of animal pre- vision in which there seem to be no>
sources from which the creature could derive its information. Thus-
the migration of birds cannot be accounted for as the result of a
sensation at the time, but clearly involves a forc-casting of future-
atmospheric changes. This presentiment Hartmann calls a clairvoy-
ance {Helhehen)^ and he considers the alleged facts of human
clairvoyance to be of precisely the same nature.

In his account of the recuperative forces of the organism, and of
the processes of organic growth, the author seeks to trace in a yet
wider region the action of unconscious will and intelligence in the
bodily organism. Disease is a disturbance of the organism by some
extonaal force, and recovery is the result of a voluntary act of “ an
individual providence” deliberately aiming at the result reached.

: Similarly growth cannot be accounted for as a puro result of
mechanicaHaws, but is seen to involve the action of a will.,

haetmann’s philosophy op the unconscious. 249 "

The result of this first part seems to be, that in the processes of
animal life there shows itself in addition to the will of which the in-
dividual is conscious, other quasi-conscious wills correlated with the
lower nervous centres, and further a wholly unconscious will which
can only be defined as a kind of tutelary spirit or providence of the
individual, and which seems to be capable of making good a number
of deficiencies of conscious will and intelligence, and of originating a
large number of actions and changes in the organism, being limited
only by certain material conditions which are not very clearly
stated.

In the second part Hartmann proceeds to illustrate the revela-
tions of the Unconscious in the human mind, as the second great
region in which the empirical results of this principle are to be
looked for. In a somewhat loose arrangement of subjects, the
author here passes under review what ho deems to be the un-
conscious elements in sexual love, in feeling generally, in character
and morality, in aesthetic judgment and artistic creation, in
mysticism, in history, &c. In all these regions the author thinks he
discovers the action of mind behind mind, of unconscious intention
behind conscious intention, just as in the first part he recognised
the presence of will, other than that of consciousness, behind the
material processes of the animal organism.

For example, men seek sexual indulgence in the illusion that
they thus reach a measure of pleasure not otherwise attainable. This
is explained by saying that what they will is not the indulgence
but the act of generation ; and it is this unconscious purpose, or
blind instinctive impulse, which gives all its meaning to the delights
of courtship, and to the charm of an opposed or rather a comple-
mentary nature for the amatory passion.^

Again, there is a mysterious element in all pleasure and pain.
This is due to the fact that all pleasure is a pacification of will, pain
a non-pacification; and in most cases the thing willed is never
present to consciousness. Thus the pleasure of colour must be sup-
posed to result from an unconscious will of the nervous substance
to re-act in a particular way under the stimulation of certain ether-
vibrations.

Other examples can only just be alluded to. Hartmann, though
affirming the real existence of the external world and of space,
accepts the empiricist’s view of the genesis of our space notions
through a synthesis of muscular and other feelings, and seeks to
show that this synthesis lies outside consciousness. Language,
again, exhibits the same principle, for human speech is too large

(1) It is not Burpxising that this point has so frequently been selocted for ridicule by
Hartmann's opponents. Hartmann certainly seems to betray somothing of a cynical
satisfaction in dectroying as far as possible the more poetic aspects of love.

250 , HAETMANN^S PHILOSOPHT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

aud complicated a growth to be the product of a single mind, while
it is too much of an organic unity to be due to the conscious actions
of many. Once more, mj^sticism (under which must be understood
not only the spiritual vision of religionists, but also clairvoyance
and even metaphysical intuition) illustrates the existence of the
Unconscious. The object or content of mystical thought is nothing
reached by experience, but a revelation from tho sphere of the
Unconscious. Finally, history, as Hegel has shown, involves the
aiming of individual wills at a general result of which they know
'nothing, and so must be regarded as a process of unconscious volition.

By the end of the second part, then, Hartmann claims to have
made out that tho presence of unconscious yet intelligent will is dis-
tinctly traceable both in the region of material processes and in that
of conscious activity. With this inductive basis he is satisfied, and
proceeds in the third part, under the title, “ The Mctaphysic of the
Unconscious,” to define and deduce the consequences of the principle
of the Unconscious as the all-pervading ontological reality. Into
many of the subtle metaphysical points discussed in this somewhat
miscellaneous section of the work we need not enter. It may be sufii-
cient to point to a few of the most striking and interesting features.

The groat problems which Hartmann has to attack in a meta-
physic of unconscious will is to show the relation of his principle to
matter as real existence, and to work out the irietaphysical process
by which this matter slowly reaches the forms of organic life, and
finally of a life which sustains a consciousness.

Matter, says Hartmann, consists, according to tho latest phy^cal
hypothesis, exclusively of innumerable atomic forces grouped toge-
ther in certain ways. These forces, or points of force, are either
positive or negative, attractive or repellent. Each atomic force is a
striving, and w^hat is this P What, then, is the striving of the
atomic force besides will, that striving w'hose content or object is
formed by the unconscious representation of that which is striven
after ? ” (p. 478), The activities of the atomic forces are simply indi-
vidual acts of volition. Thus easily is matter resolved into will and
idea, and the radical diGlerence supposed to exist between matter
and mind efiaced. The identity of tho two is now no longer an
inconceivable postulate or a product of mystic conception, hut is
elevated to a scientific cognition.”

Next as to the evolution of organic life. It is here that Hart-
mann's principles will have to be tried. He conceives the process
of organic development to be distinctly willed and intended by the
tr^onscious, tho object aimed at being a higher and still higher
degree of life. But how are we to conceive this “organizing
tTnconscious ” ? Is it simply the sum of the individual acts of will
supplied by the forces of the atoms of matter P In other words, is

IIAllTMANN^S rHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

251

organic evolution a mechanical process explicable hj the known
laws of material processes P Hartmann is very clear on this point.
The ‘Unconscious in organic evolution is something quite apart from
the material forces or volitions implied in bodily changes. It is a
will enlightened by an intelligence which presides over these, which
every now and then interfetrs with their action by introducing a new
clement.

This conception of an unconscious will (over and above the mere
volitions of the bodily atoms) whoso action cannot be reduced to a
mechanical operation, is brought out with great prominence in tho
author’s discussion of Darwinism. Hartmann admits the action of
individual variation, inheritance, and natural selection, but, appeal*
ing to objections raised by Mr. Wallace and Professor Hageli, ho
thinks these processes are wholly inadequate to account for the pro-
gress of animal life. Natural selection explains, ho thinks, only the
development and transformation of existing organs into some now
^hyiixologwal arrangement ” demanded by the circumstances of the
time, it is impotent to account for a properly morphological change.
The main part of the development, both of plants and of animals,
is due to the direct action of the organizing Unconscious. What
Darwin’s principle represents is simply the action of certain mecha-
nical arrangements which the Unconscious finds, so to speak, ready
prepared for it, and wisely makes use of. Hartmann lays down a
number of principles, which he thinks fully explain tho processes of
organic evolution. Among tliese we find the following, which will
illustrate the author’s conception of his subject. "The Unconscious
makes use of the individual deviations which arise accidentally in
every process of generation, in so far as these present themselves in
those directions which answer to its aim.”

Let us now see wliat Hartmann makes of tho genesis of conscious-
ness in this system of things. The points of contrast between
consciousness and the Unconscious are said to be such as these :
Consciousness is capable of becoming diseased and exhausted, while
the Unconscious is not subject to these drawbacks. The one has
duration and involves memory, while tho other is timeless. The
first is liable to error, the second infallible. Again, consciousness is
necessarily conditioned by the presence of a material brain or nervous
ganglia. On this point Hartmann fully goes with the materialists.
The final point of difference between the Unconscious and conscious-
ness is that while in the former will and intellectual representation
are inseparable, in the latter the idea may become detached from the
Volition. Consciousness is thus a possibility of the emancipation of
the intellectual from the volitional. The following is the process
hy which consciousness as emancipated intellectual representation
arises : —

262 HAETMANN^S PHILOSOPHY OP THE UNCONSCIOUS.

** The representation has no interest in its own existence, no endeavour to
reach it ; consequently, so long as thoro is no consciousness, it is only called
forth by the will, and the unconscious mind can only havo such representa-
tions as, being called into being by the will, form the content of the will. Here
organised matter suddenly' breaks in on the peace of the Unconscious, and
forces on the astonished individual mind during the necessai'y reaction of sensa-
tion a representation which falls on it os out of heaven, for it dnds in itself no

will for this representation The great revolution has come to pass, the

first step in the redemption of the world is taken, the idea is snatched away
from the will in order to confront it in the future as an independent might, in
order to subject that power of which it has been the slave.”— P. 394.

Consciousness is thus a product of two factors, the unconscious
mind and material activity, which again is but a form of volition.
That is to say, its genesis is the result of a collision of two wills,
namely, the will of the unconscious individual mind and the reacting
wills of the atoms of the brain. This rupture of the quiescence of
the unconscious mind is, Hartmann tells us, necessarily accompanied
with a feeling of pain (Unlust), which accordingly is an inseparable
ingredient of all conscious life. Unconscious wills of individual
organisms, atomic wills in inorganic nature — these conceptions
appear to point to a final solution of the problem of being by a form
of pluralism somewhat akin to Leibnitz’s theory of monads and
Herbart’s doctrine of simple beings. But Hartmann’s views resemble
rather those of Spinoza and later philosophers who postulate one
comprehensive ultimate substance. His theory is distinctly termed
a form of Mbniftm, which recognises but one substance or ultimate
reality.^ All these varieties of will are, he tells us, but different
functions of one and the same substance. First of all, it is plain
that the unconscious minds of the same individual are all one, else
there could not be that wonderful harmony of the organism.”
Further, it must be supposed that the unconscious minds of different
individuals are the same, and the fixed belief in the opposite is
only an illusion of the practical instinct which continually cries I,
I.” Finally, the atomic wills of inorganic matter are to be. con-
ceived as manifestations of the same metaphysical entity.

The author takes great pains to point out what he considers to be
the correct relation of his metaphysical principles to those of pre-
vious philosophers, including Plato, Leibnitz, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer. Into these observations we cannot follow him. He
lays great stress on the assertion that his system serves to reconcile
the two directions of speculative thought represented by Hegel and
Schopenhauer, namely, towards the erection of the will and of the
'idea exclusively into the ultimate reality. In a highly curious bit
of imaginative writing he seeks to describe the original condition
of the Unconscious before it manifested its activity in any form of

(1) It znny bo seen from this that with Hartmann space and time, though objective
realities in the ]>hcnomoiial universe, do not exist for the ultimate substantial will.

Hartmann’s PHiLOsoPHr op the unconscious. 253

phenomenal existence, and shadows forth the rather astounding
process by which the idea came into possession of full existence.
The idea only exists, he says, when the will has grasped it as its
content; before that it is neither actually existent nor poten-
tially existent, nor on the other hand non-existent. What is it
then P Language does not supply a proper word for the expression
of this notion ; one might most readily characterize this condition as
latent existence ” (pp. 806 — 7).

One point in this superlatively metaphysical determination of
the nature o^ the IJnconscious must not be passed by, as it is
intimately connected with the author's conception of scientific
method. The idea he tells us represents the logical ; the will, which
simply strives, and of itself knows not how to attain, the illogical.
At the same time both are included under the notion of causality.

That the stone which I let full falls, depends on the continuation of
volition to the present moment ; but that it falh, and with a certain
velocity, lies in the nature of the logical." Causality is thus con-
ceived “ as logical necessity, which receives actuality through the
will." End or aim is accordingly the positive side of the logical,
and we may adopt the proposition of Leibnitz, causa* effickntes pendent
a eausis finalibm. Logical necessity is the universal, and causality
and finality, to which motivation (of will) may bo added, are
only ‘^difierent projections" in which this universal presents itself
when considered from different points of view. Thus is the teleo-
logical method restored to science by means of a metaphysical
demonstration.

A word must be said on the relation of the Unconscious to the
God of Theism as defined by the author. Hartmann insists that his
principle really includes all that is essential in the hypothesis of an
intelligent deity. Thus he urges that his noumenon, though uncon-
scious, is not blind, but, from the vast superiority of its intelligence
(clairvoyance) above all conscious intelligence, must rather be
regarded as supra-conscious." Moreover, it is omnipotent as
well as omniscient, and though not itself conscious, is the bearer of
individual consciousnesses ; so that it should, Hartmann thinks, be
accepted as a full equivalent for the old conception of a personal
intelligence.

It is now full time that we pass on to consider what is undoubtedly
the most interesting part of Hartmann's system, namely his doctrine
of pessimism, and his proffered solution of the problem of life by
means of his theory of the Unconscious. This constitutes the prac-
tical sidd of his philosophy.

That conscious existence is universally and necessarily an excess of
pain over pleasure, Hartmann holds no less assuredly than Bchopen-
liauer; and since he is most unmistakably utilitarian in recc^isiiig

254 habxmann’s philosophy of the unconscious.

notbing valuable in conscious life but pleasure and absence of pain,
hla view of existence as ordinarily understood is about as glocdny as
the most despondent pessimist could wish. We think life is beau-
tiful, delightful, but wo are deceived. It is all vanity, that is
illusion, nothingness.”^

But Hartmann has his own way of reaching this conclusion.
Schopenhauer had been content to prove his pessimism by a very
easy method. AU volition, he says, as a striving after something,

springs out of deficiency {Mangel), out of discontent with one’s
condition, and is therefuro a state of suffering so long it is not satis-
fied ; but no satisfaction is lasting, it is rather only the starting-point
of a now striving.” ® Sometimes, with something of impatience and a
suggestion of grim satisfaction, ho would tell the objector to assure
himself of the truth of pessimism by comparing the sensation of the
animal that devours another with that of the other which is
devoured.^

Hartmann is not satisfied with such a short cut. His method is
that of ** induction,” and so ho sets to work to prove, by what ho
considers to be overwhelming evidence, that human existence is a
miserable one, and so far from being made less so by the progress of
human development, is in a sense growing more and more miserable
as intelligence increases and the true value of human ends becomes
calmly recognised. Hartmann considers that the predominance of
misery in human life may be fully shown by a separate consideration
of the value of health, liberty, sufiiciency of means and other neces-
saries of enjoyment, of the instincts of hunger and love, of the social
relations and friendship, ol ambition, of scientific activity and the cul-
tivation of art, and of many other sides of human life and endeavour.

The belief in the possibility of happiness is, then, according to
Hartmann, an illusion, and he proceeds to distinguish three stages in
this illusion. In the first, happiness is supposed to be attainable by
the individual now in the present stage of human development.
This is the belief of the naive uncultivated mind, and answers to the
childhood of the world or antiquity. The second stage shows us the
individual waking up to the impossibility of happiness in this earthly
life, and placing this happiness in a transcendent existence after
death. The youth of the world, or the middle ages, is the period in
which this illusion flourished. In the third stage, men begin to

(1) In one respect, indeed, Hartmann's view is less cheerless than that of Schopen-
hauer, who assorts that all pleiwuro is negative, in so far as it can only arise indirectly
through the removal or alleviation of pain. Hartmann sees through this fallacy, and puts
pleasure and pain on an equality, as being each both negative and positive (pp. 665 seq.)^

(2) ** Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," book iv., { 56, vol.' i. p. 365, Frauenstddt’a
editto of Schopenhauer's collected works.

(3) Schopenhauer does indeed say {Idtd, p. 381 seg.) that the misery of life can he
proved both d priori and d posteriori, but he hardly makes a pretence of supplying,
the latter proof.

hahtmajSn’s philosophy op the unconscious. 255

forego all thought of individual happiness^ but still think of
happiness as attainable by future generations of mankind. This is
the growth of modem time, or the manhood of the world. Each of
these illusions Hartmann seeks to upset by a separate line of
argument.

And now, what docs our author propose to do with mankind in
this apparent dead-lock P Schopenhauer had been content to suggest
as the only way out of the difficulty what the mystic ascetics of all
ages had implicitly taught, and tho Buddhist religibn had distinctly
defined — namely, the breaking or killing of the individual will
through renunciation of life’s pleasures, the “ denial of the will to
live,” or, to express it otherwise, the gradual quiescence of tho will
in view of its own contradictoriness and nothingness.

Hartmann thinks this is a confession of intellectual impotence,
and no solution of the problem of existence at all. While a pessimist
in an empirical sense, he cannot be content with pessimism as a spe-
culative creed. Pessimism must be reconciled with optimism under
some higher conception of existence, and this Hartmann seeks to
effect by means of his theory of the Unconscious.

First of all, then, Hartmann accepts the consequence that this
world, with its preponderance of evU, is the product of the Uncon-
scious, which ho here names a creator. Further, he agrees with the
optimist Leibnitz so far as 1o assert that the world is arranged and
governed as wisely and excellently as it is possible for it to bo that
if, in the all- wise Unconscious, among all possible representations,
that of a better world had had a place, this other would certainly have
been produced.” This could only be made doubtful by showing that
the Unconscious is aiming at an unworthy final end, or uses inappro-
priate means for securing this end, neither of which is possible.

Granting, then, that this is tho best possible world, how came it to
be so bad P According to Hartmann, the world owes its existence
(though not its form of existence) to a non-rational act, inasmuch us
the will in itself, apart from inteUectual representation, is alogical.
The existence of the universe is due primarily to the blind and uncon-
trollable impulse of the unconscious will to will. Hence the elements
of incompleteness and misery. If tho will had not willed — which was
impossible — ^there would have been no universe, consequently no evil.
On the other hand, since its existence was necessitated by this rest-
less condition of the will, the mode of existence — the what ” and
how” of existence — ^is as good as it could have been through the
presence of the national or logical element. This factor of the Un-
conscious being once necessarily called in to help the will to act, has
gradually acquired independence and supremacy, and this is shown
in the direction of the whole world-process to a rational final end.

(1) Leibnitz rested this assertion on his conception of eyil os negatiye and limitinf.

266 haetmann’s philosophy op the unconscious.

We must now inquire into the nature of this £nal end {EiidzwccJi)
of the world-process. Hartmann follows Hegel very closely in consi-
dering this problem. Is, he asks, consciousness the final end, as
Hegel asserts, and as might appear from the fact that it is gradually
progressing and rising ? Certainly not. It cannot bo an end to
itself (Seldsf-ztceck), “With pains it is born, with pains it devours
its existence, with pains it purchases its elevation ; and what does it
offer as a compensation for all this P A vain self-mirroring ! ”
What, then, is the final end ? Consciousness is clearly the
end. But it lies in the notion of consciousness that the intellect
should be emancipated from the will, and tlie will be resisted and
finally annihilated. Hence, saj^^s Hartmann, “ can it be doubtful
that the all-wise Unconscious, which thinks both end and means as
one, has formed consciousness merely in order to release the will
from the unblessedness of its willing, from which it cannot release
itself — ^that the final end of the world-process, for which conscious-
ness serves as the last means, is to realise the greatest possible
attainable condition of happiness, namely that of painlessness
(pp. 755-6) P

Here we are taken back to a point frequently alluded to in the
course of Hartmann^s cx|)osition, namely, that every mode of willing
in the Unconscious is accompanied with misery or pain. The con-
dition of the unconscious will, before the representation comes to its
relief, is a “ hungry empty ” willing, and moreover an infinite
willing, and all that this representation as a finite quantity helps it
to attain fails to satisfy its greed. There remains, then, an endless
surplus of hunger, and consequently an absolute unblcssedness and
self-torment without pleasure. From this condition the idea as
the logical has to release the unreasoning will. It has “to make
good what the irrational will has made bad.’' How is this to be
accomplished? How can reason silence the clamour of hungry
will P Only through consciousness. There must be a universal act
of denial of will on the part of all conscious minds. In consequence
of the development of intelligence and the recognition of the irra-
tionality of all willing and striving, the human species, or some
higher beings endowed with conscious intelligence, either on our
planet or elsewhere, in whom a sufBicient amount of will has been
concentrated, will execute the great finale of the world drama by
one common act of will-annihilation.

It follows from this, says Hartmann, that Schopenhauer’s pre-
scription of an individual denial of will is premature and erroneous.
The immediately right thing for the individual is, on the contrary,
the affirmation of will to live.” Only by following out the instincts
of nature, and by helping to prolong the life of mankind, can the
^al end, the release of will from its inherent misery, bo reached.

257

Hartmann’s philosophy of the unconscious.

The highest duty of man is thus to work in harmony with the
unconscious mind, to help on the world-process by seeking in every
way to promote, first of all, the general growth of intelligence, by
which men will be the more quickly brought to recognise the futility
of willing, and, secondly, the spread of sympathy,^ by which they
will be lifted out of their narrow individual aims to take part in
one universal aim, the annihilation of all misery by the total denial
of will. This reconciliation of optimism and pessimism, says Hart-
mann, unlike pessimism pure and unalloyed, supplies an adequate
basis for practical effort and hopeful endeavour.

ITT.

Such, then, in brief, is the substance of ^artmann^s teaching ; and
now what is to be said respecting its scientific or philosophic value ?

No thoughtful reader can have failed to note, again and again, the
insufficiency of Hartmann’s reasonings, and it will bo found that this
logical inadeqiiatcncss presents itself even more strikingly in the
original than in the brief exposition just given. The facile way,
for example, in which the author leaps from the physical hypothesis
of atomic forces (which thoughtful physicists recognise to be nothing
but convenient fictions, the product of our own minds) to the con-
clusion that all matter is will, is characteristic of his process of
induction.

Let us look a little more closely at one or two of the most striking
fallacies which the author perpetrates under the guise of the induc-
tive method.

The first thing 'which a little staggers a man accustomed to the
sober ways of a really inductive science, is the assumption that there
exists any form of mental life which is unconscious. We say assump-
tion, for the “scientific proof” Hartmann offers, drawn from certain
ambiguous statements of Helmholtz and others, as to the existence of
“unconscious inferences,” &c., is urholly inconclusive. It is obviously
impossible to prove from scientific evidence that mind extends
beyond the boundaries of consciousness, including our own and that
of the lower animals. The reasoning of Kant, Hamilton, and
others, that in the human mind there are processes which do not
affect consciousness, have been fully upset again and again, being
found to rest on two fallacious assumptions; {a) that an idea or
feeling which is instantly forgotten did not impress consciousness, and
(5) that the direction of consciousness by voluntary attention cannot

(1) HaTtmann follows Schopenliaucr in making tho esscnco of sympithy to be the
recognition of tho substantial Identity of the individual subject with the object of his
sympathy. Schopenhauer thinks sympathy may be expressed by the formula of the
Veda, “Tat twam asi!" (That art thou!}. See Mias Zimmem’s interesting volume
Arthur Sehepenhauer, his life wnd Ub IhHotophy^ p. 233.

VOL. XX. nIs. S

258

JIABTMANN^S PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

embrace two or more distinct lines of mental activity at once. It is
doubtful, indeed, whether, as Dr. Carpenter and others affirm, there
is any such thing as unconscious cerebration — ^that is, cerebral
activity that usually involves conscious feeling or thought, but at
times has no such concomitant.' But oven wore this so, it would be
no proof of an unconscious mental state.

To this total absence of evidence in favour of unconscious mental
actions, must be added the insuperable psychological objection to
the conception of such actions. It is not enough to say that since
mind is only known to us as consciousness, any attempt to conceive
unconscious mind must be a complete failure. We have the most
complete assurance that all mental states owe their existence to just
those processes of attention, memory, and comparison which make up
consciousness, developing and growing in the same degree as these/^
A distinct feeling or thought is the product of many slow processes
of developing consciousness; and to speak, as Hartmann does, of
distinct mental representations and previsions of the future as sud-
denly springing up any when and anywhere in the animal organism,
without any previous connected succession of mental states, is a
psychological absurdity. Hot only is there nothing to prove an
extra-conscious mind, such mind is unthinkable and, if we are to
reason by induction at all, impossible.

In the second place, Hartmann's conclusion that mental activity
is capable of being carried on with any form of material process is
a pure assumption, and, further, a highly improbable one. We reach
mind (objectively) in two ways : first by its external results, secondly
by its external conditions. It may be said that the physical conditions
4}f mind are only known when the whole extent of its manifestations
is known ; but when these conditions have been sufficiently studied,
in a large number of unambiguous cases, it becomes possible to form
an induction as to what processes are essential to mental activity.
We may then reason, with a high degree of probability, that beyond
these limits no mental phenomena are possible. Such an induction
has been framed which says that there is no mental activity beyond
the limits of the nervous system. Now Hartmann vaults over this
stupendous obstacle. It is true he discusses the material conditions
of consciomness, but he never once asks whether aU mind (supposing
for the moment there is an unconscious variety) is conditioned by
certain physical structures and processes. Thus he leaps to the con-
clusion that mind coexists with certain bodily processes which are
wholly unconnected with the nervous system.

(1) See this point ably argued by Dr. Ireland in tbo Journal of Kmtal Scienee for
October, 1875.

(2) One of the startling assumptions which Hartmann finds himself compellud to

make is, that consciousness bos no degrees ; another is that volition is never a conscious
process. <

HAETMAITN^S PHILOSOPHY OP THE UNCONSCIOUS. 259

And now it may be asked what kind of evidence the author brings
to -nullify the force of this induction. Does he show, by a process of
strict scientific proof, that mind manifests itself beyond the limits
of the nervous system? Not at all. He finds certain physical
events taking place which look like actions of an intelligent will,
and he concludes that here too mental activity goes on. With the
feeblest pretence of proving that they cannot result from mechanical
arrangements — as though we yet knew all the secrets of force and
motion — he seeks to satisfy his readers that they are the effect of
mind or will.'

Here, then, its nakedness being scarcely veiled by a thin cover-
ing of so-called proof, is the old teleological fallacy. Something
is as yet unexplained by natural laws. It looks like certain human
actions which are directed to an end : ergo, it too must be the
product of will. Every argument can be urged against Hartmann’s
assumption, which has been brought again and again to ridicule
such ndU'P reasonings as those of a savage chief who sees the fuiy of
a slain foe in a devastating storm, or those of a child who fondly
supposes that the day breaks in order to wake up its mother for
the customary morning story. One fallacy Hartmann certainly does
escape. He is consistent, and seeks to find purpose in all natural
events alike ; but to what an impoverishment of the puipose I
Hartmann’s discussion of the theory of descent and Darwinism,
to which he has devoted a separate volume,^ must be characterised
as simply amusing to every one who recognises how completely
Darwin’s method, by raising a strictly mechanical process to the
rank of a pnncipal cause of organic evolution, removes the ground
from under the feet of all would-bo teleological interpreters of life.®

(1) Tho completeness of Hartmann's failure to establish his extra-conscious mind on
a foundation of physiological scienco, may be seen perhaps in the fact that no man of
scientific reputation has cared to deal with his arguments, whereas men . of no great
Boientifio power have not only attempted to upset Hartmann's position, but have really
succeeded in doing so. We refer especially to tho rather loose but effective attack
made by Dr. Stiebeling in his Naturwissenschaft gegen Philosophie,*’ which a disciple
of Hartmann has thought it well to answer step by stop, and to tho strictures made on
Hartmann’s scientific conclusions by W. Tobias in his work, Die Grenzen der Philo-
sophie." A much more thoughtful demonstration of the untenability of Hartmann’s
biological assumptions, and of their essentially unscientific nature, may bo found in a
work entitled Das Unbewussle vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenz-
theorie” (Berlin, 1872).

(2) Hartmann shows himself quite incapable of understanding Darwin’s principles.
He supposes that it strictly follows, from this theory of natural selection, that in every
locality only one species—namely, the highest in the order of development— would
finally survive (pp. 602-3). Hartmann’s qualifications for biological speculation may
be estimated by the aflSrmation (p. 606} that a few teeth or vertebrm are ** quite
indifferent” in the struggle for existence.

(8) This is well pointed out in the thoughtful hrocKwn just alluded to— **Das
Unbewusste vom Btondpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenz-theoxie.” The Vriter
ingeniously sugf^ests that a good part of Hartmann’s system was put together before the

2 8

260 HAETMANN^S PHIIOSOPHT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

With respect to the philosophical value of Hartmann’s principle of
the Unconscious we do not propose to say much. From beginning’
to end it seems hopelessly incoherent to us^ and we much fear that
in the above account of it wc have secured a measure of consistency
by ** reading into” particular passages. We can only name one or
two points which socm to us to demand further explanation. What,
for example, arc the precise mutual relations of the several forma
or manifestations of unconscious will which present themselves in
organic life — for instance, the atomic wills of the bodily tissues^
the individual conscious will, the unconscious wills of the several
nerve-centres, the presiding providential will of the individual, and
finally the tutelary will of the species which appears in the procesa
of reproduction ; and, further, liow are all these related to the one
substantial will P Again : how can the unconscious have the pain
of unsatisfied hungry greed, and yet not become conscious P How,
once more, is the final universal denial of conscious will to be con-
ceived psychologically, except as a new act of volition P ^ Finally,
how can we suppose that this cessation of conscious mil is to ensure
the cessation of all will, when w'e know that consciousness is always
correlated with a given amount of material force (atomic wills), and
that this amount is a part of a totality of indestructible force?
These are but a few of the little diflGiculties which force themselves
on the careful reader of Hartmann’s work.

The last difficulty wdiich we have to urge relates to Hartmann’s
proof of pessimism, or the triumph of misery in human life. The
easy way in which the author satisfies himself on this point is truly
delightful. While professing to provide an inductive proof, his
reasoning is a series oipetitiones principiu For example, ho thinks it
is an argument in favour of an excess of pain, that while pleasure
and pain both “ attack ” the nervous system and produce a species
of weariness, the pain in this case xmdergoes an increase while, the
pleasure suffers a loss. As though this exhaustion after pain were
not one of the most happy features of the human organism, sihee by
deadening sensibility it lulls the pain (instead of adding to it) and
enables men to bear what otherwise might well prove maddening
with firmness, if not with composure. Another instance of a really
charming capacity for missing the real gist of a fact, is to be found
in the author’s account of work. Work, he argues, is simply and
purely an evil, and is only undertaken as apfs-e^/fcr, that is to avoid

V

author had studied BarwiD. It is noteworthy that Hartmann in his autohiography
makes no mention of his introduction to Darwin’s writings.

(1) It is really rofrediing to seo how Schopenhauer and Hartmann try to get out of
th^ psychological contradiction involved in thiB ** annihilation of will.” Schopenhauer
aaiorted that suicide was not denial of will, whereas a slow self-destruction by
SEbstinenoe from food was such a denial. Hartmann’s subtleties in trying to show how
will can aocompliidi the process of feh de ae, are^ a really choice specimfyi of verbal
manipulation. ^

haetmakn’s philosophy of the uhcohscious. 261

4lie greater evil of ennui (not to speak of hunger, &c.). This must
mean, of course, that no one would enter on intellectual work, for
instance, unprompted by want or ennui, in deliberate preference of
such work to a passive mode of enjoyment. We must really prefer
the candid assumptions of Schopenhauer to the thin disguise of
argument which Hartmann seeks to foist on us.

One may well ask whether all attempts to settle the precise
hedonistic worth of life by strict calculation, are not in their nature
absurd, whether the facts arc not too complex and too multiform to
allow of a nice balance cf quantities, and whether, therefore, the
£nal beliefs of men, thinkers as well as others, as to the complexion
of existence must not continue to be largely the results of a thousand
subjective influences and specialities of individual experience, obser-
vation, and temperament. Hartmann points out the liability of error
from emotional sources in the optimist’s conclusions. Are there no
corresponding sources of error in the case of the pessimist P and if it
is so, may it not perhaps be the part of a true rationality to abide by
the instinctil^ conviction of healthy natures that happiness is in a
measure attainable, a notion that has at least the merit of being a
good workable hypothesis ?

If our estimate of Hartmann’s reasonings be a just one, we may well
ask what it is that has given him for the hour at least the appearance
•of a real intellectual force in Germany. Fully to understand this,
would be to trace the author’s relations to foregoing philosophers,
and to show wherein his theories correspond to the present specula-
tive wants of Germany. One important factor which has contributed
to Hartmann’s success, is the lute-awakened interest in Schopenhauer,
especially in his pessimistic ideas. There is little doubt that Hart-
mann is read in the vast majority of cases for the sake of his
pessimism. Why the interest in this cheerless and not too rational
view of the world should continue even unto to-day in a country
which is just entering upon the rich fruits of national union and
independence, is a question which we cannot attempt to discuss in
this place. Can it be that in spite of all that Germany has obtained,
there remains a rather alarming amount of social discontent P Or is
this rather protracted attack of WcltschmerZy a natural reaction after
the joyous aspirations and hopes attendant on a first fruition of a
national literature and artP There are not wanting passages in
Hartmann’s book which suggest that despair of a satisfying msthetic
life, the ideal promise of Schiller, and the apparent attainment of
Goethe, has no little to do with the author’s estimate of life’s re-
sources.

l^ext to the present engrossing interest in pessimism, Hartmann’s
success is probably due to certain peculiarities in his mode of philoso-
phizing and in his literary style. The former may be characterised

262 HABTMAITN’S PHILOSOFHT of the T7HC0N6C10TJS.

OB exnmently laic. Hartmann tells ns in his autobiography that he
has never cared for the praise or blame of the guild philosophers^
and it is perhaps well for him that he possesses this indifference. A
style of theorizing less like the closely logical and exhaustive method
of Kant or of Hegel it would be difficult to imagine. If philosophers
hesitate to recognise Schopenhauer as a genuine metaphysician^ they
may well pause before they award this rank to his successor. He
brings to his task the freshness as well as the superficiality of a real
man of the world. Also he displays a certain Prussian and even
Prussian military promptness and directness of intellectual move-
ment. He pooh poohs all side issues, sees one objective towards
which he must push on his attack, and after a manner attains it.
Nothing can well be more entertaining to the serious philosophical
student than to see this jaunty Junker forcing his way into the
midst of the learned priests of philosophy, and showing them by a
mere gesture how the great question which has puzzled them so long
is to be solved. When, for example, he sums up the arguments for
and against the existence of an independent world, as though it were
a simple military problem, susceptible of a solution by the calculus
of probabilities, and when he similarly demonstrates that the chances
arc infinitely against any now ebullition of will on tho part of the
Unconscious after the grand act of universal renunciation of will,
tho effect on a severely trained philosophic mind is one of im-
measurable hilarity. But then these very qualities arc just such as
to dazzle the popular mind, which is always predisposed to think
that its own unaided common sense can explain everything.

Nothing can better show the characteristic practical skill of Hart-
mann than the selection of his principal name, tho Unconscious."^
With something of an American quickness of scent for what is in
the air he recognises that in science the'nature of unconscious nervous
processes which seem to resemble conscious processes in all save this
one feature, is the growing question of the hour. This idea, detached
from that of tho nervous movements which alone give it its meaning,
he proceeds with admirable practical insight to erect into a meta-
physical principle. The Unconscious — sublime negation that seems
to suggest vast cavernous regions of a dim spiritual life, and yet
after every new inspection shows itself to be an impalpable inanity,
a very nothing, or shall we say like the Germans an “Un-
thing ! This conception shows that Hartmann, like Schopenhauer,
has a distinct touch of poetic imagination, and, indeed, his Uncon-
scious, in all its curious mysterious movements, is alwa;ys striving
to become more and more anthropomorphic. In its power of
appealing to the reader’s imagination, and even of rousing a deep
vague sentiment of awe, the Unconscious is perhaps superior to its
kindred negation the Unknowable. James Sully. '

EOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

At the moment of closing our last summary, everything wore a pacific
aspect, not only in Europe but cVen on the shores of the Danube. AVc
indicated, however, the dark speck on the horizon, and observed that more
than one incident was to be expected. The number of the Review had
hardly appeared, before our anticipations were realised. Servia first, and
then Montenegro declared war against Turkey. Whether Servia was
pressed to it by official Russia — as is denied with more emphasis than ever
— or she allowed herself to be drawn on by the encouragements of the
Russian Slavophils, the fact is that she had gone too far to draw back. If
Prince Milan had tried to arrest the popular movement which impelled the
Servians to go to the succour of their brethren, ho would have been over-
thrown in favour of his rival, Kara Giorgiovitch, who, for his part, would
have had no hesitations. And for that matter, if wo leave out of account
the present sufferings, which certainly will bo cruel enough, one must
confess that Servia has everything to gain by war, and nothing to lose. If
she is victorious, she gains her end at once ; if she is defeated, she lays
the first stone of her future greatness.

The principle of nationalities is an immense and incalculable force, which
the politicians of the old school vainly persist in ignoring. Like all ideas that
have their root in the heart of musses, this force is indestructible, and grows
and spreads in the midst of reverses. The defeat of Novara was the starting-
point of the aggrandisement of Piedmont. Piedmont had taken the cause of
Italy in hand. iShe was defeated while carrying in her hand the Italian flag.
From that moment the little Piedmontese State became the representative of
Italian nationality. The house of Savoy, which had staked its crown in an
unequal struggle with Austria, was honcefoi'th assured of one day exchang-
ing it for the sceptre of the united Peninsula. All the living forces of the
nation, even the republicans themselves with Mazzini at their head, worked
in the cause. In 1870, if France had vanquished Prussia, and cut
Germany to pieces, Germanic unity would none the less have been realised
sooner or later, and it may be after half a century of conflict, with more
enthusiasm, generality, and consistency, and fewer obstacles than have
attended the actual triumph of to-day. Suppose Servia to be beaten, she
will perhaps be temporarily occupied, but Europe will not allow the
Turks again to reign at Belgrade — and even this extension of power
would in truth only have the effect of weakening them. On condition
that its fall is heroic, Servia will be the legendary representative of
the Slavic nationality of the Danube, the centre of the hope of a
future reconstitution of the great southern Slavia of that Empire of
Douchan, which fell so gloriously under the blows of the Ottoman at
the famous battle of Eassova. In every household in Croatia, in Dalmatia, in
Bosnia, in Bulgaria, in Hungarian Servia, the people will sing of an evening to

264

HOME AND EOEEIGN AFPAIES.

tho notes of the guzla the prowess of the soldiers of Prince Milan and Prince
Nikita. This national epopee, this abstract idea of nationality, thus graven in
the spirit of a whole people, will iinally one day take shape. As the Turks
can never assimilate the Slaves, as they will ever remain for the latter not
fellpw-citizens but masters and tyrants, their abhorred yoke must sooner
or later be broken, when the rayahs shall become more numerous, richer,
and better organized. Thus tho progi*ess of civilisation must work against
the Turks and in favour of their subjects.

What will be the issue of tho war V Tho telegrams that fill the columns of
the newspapers are too confused and too contradictory for us to seize tho actual
situation clearly. The Servian staff docs not seem to have adopted the tactics
that prevail more and more in modern wars, and which in the struggle of 1870
produced such amazing results. Instead of concentrating the greatest numbers
of troops on a given point, so as to crush the enemy under superior force,
they have dispersed their divisions over the whole border of tho principality,
and begun the attack at four different points. Possibly the composition of
the troops, and the weakness of the artillery did not allow a single great
battle. Perhaps they had a hope in penetrating the enemy's territory on
every side, to find there important reinforcements in the insurgent popula-
tion. A corps d' amide was directed towards the east to defend Saitschar and
the Timok, and in case of victory to threaten Widdin. A success on this side
would be important, because in coming down the Danube the Servians would
find it easier to receive the material assistance, as well as the recruits,
continually coming to them across Boumania. On the banks of the
Timok, fighting has been going on on both sides with much courage
and impetuous resolution, but so far without any great results. On the
south, the principal army commanded by Tcheruaielf turned Nisch by Pirot
and Akpalanka, at tho same time threatening Sophia with a view to stopping
tho reinforcements that were coming by rail from Constantinople. It seems
that he has not been able to carry out his design ; but the rumours of his
defeat which come to us from Constantinople are without confirmation.
Never has tho telegraph transmitted so many falsehoods. Every day
Servians and Turks alike announce victories, that at tho end of two or
three days arc never thought of more. Zach, who commands the third
corps towards tho south-west, and who was to eflect a junction with tho
Montenegrins, has evidently not succeeded. Finally in tho west',’ on the
banks of the Save, Alympitch with a fourth corps has attacked Bclina,
but has not been able to take it from tho Turks. He calls upon the ini^ur-
gents of Bosnia, but does not advance into the interior of the country.
All these movements are devoid of any of tho importance that is attributed
to them. No decisive battle has been fought, and the Servians have no
interest in playing their game in a single throw. But still, if by concen-
trating superior forces on a single point, they had been able to obtain on
one side or the other a striking and indisputable success, the moral effect
would have been enormous. One recalls the disastrous consequences of
the first defeats on the French army, and still more on the resolution of
its commanders. In tho East, where on both sides it is an object to
rouse the populations, moral effect is an essential element. An important

HOME AJSJ) FOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

265

victory of the Servians would not only have discouragedjthe Turks, hut would
have stirred the Bulgarians and the Bosnians. The Montenegrins obtain
real successes. On one side they have [occupied the road from Klek to the
interior ; on the other they are masters of the tablo-land of Gatchko ; they
have taken Novesinje, and Mostar is surrounded. The Turks are demoral-
ised ; they shut themselves up in towns, and dare not risk an encounter
in the open country.

The disproportion of forces is very great. The Slavic population engaged
in the struggle count in all a million and a half of souls. The Turks can
call for tlikteen or fourteen millions of men, without counting Egypt ;
and Egypt is sending troops, the sentiment of Mussulman solidarity
having in the Khedive's mind overcome his desire to achieve his own inde-
pendence. European opinion, so far as it is to bo judged by the Exchanges
of the great capitals, has come to some peculiar conclusions as to the war.
When the telegraph from Goustantinoplo announces Turkish victories, the
funds go up, and they go down when the news comes from Belgrade that
it is the Servians, on the contrary, who have won the day. A Stock-
exchange has no more sympathy for one than the other ; but it supposes
that, the Servians once crushed, all would again become orderly. No
doubt if Servia, in discouragement, were at once to ask for peace, as has
been asserted tho last few days, then ulterior complications would be
avoided. But as tho resistance of Herzegovina, which counts 300,000
inhabitants, has lasted nearly a year, and as all Europe has been in perturba-
tion for six months, may we hope for so sudden an abatement ? People do
not consider that if tho Turks were worsted, no foreign state, certainly not
England, would have to go to their rescue. If the Servians were worsted,
and if they opposed to their conquerors a heroic resistance under the eyes
of all Europe, it would bo a severe trial for the Slave sentiment and a
grave check for Kussia, who in spite of the pertinacity with which she
repels the cliargo, and perhaps truly, still passes in tho eyes of the entire
East as having instigated the whole movement. No doubt if tho Emperor
Alexander wishes for peace, whatever else may happen, ho can imposo
peace, for ho is absolute master. But if anything could seduco or provoke
him to renounce the system of absolute non-intervention, it would be the
occupation of Belgrade by tho Turks. We may believe that the peace of
Europe runs no risk, so long as all the states have an interest in avoiding
war. But if it were exposed to danger, it could only be in case the
defeat of Servia should compel Bussia to act. Bo the defeat t>f the Turks
can hardly in any case lead to a conflict. We cannot say as much of a
defeat of the Servians. Has not tho Journal de St, Petenhourg^ an official
organ, recently said that in that case the Emperor would not resist the
aspirations of all his people ?

Let us now see what has been the attitude of the great Powers. After
reading the text of the Berlin Memorandum, we readily understand how
France and Italy should have given their adhesion to it without hesitation,
and even without consulting with one another. We have some difficulty in
accounting for its rejection by England, after she had accepted the Andrassy

266

HOME AKD FOBEIOX AEFAIRS.

programme, 'which 'was really quite as strong a menace to the indepen-
dence of Turkey. The Berlin Memorandum claimed, 1st, an armistice ;
2nd, materials for rebuilding the churches that had been destroyed, and
assistance to the refugees returning to their own homes; 8rd, that the
Turkish Commissary should come to an understanding with the mixed com-
mission mentioned in the Andrassy Note, in order to guarantee the serious
application of the promised reforms and to control their execution ; 4th,
that advice should be given to the Porte to concentrate its troops, so as to
avoid a collision ; 5th, that the Christians should keep their arms during
the time of the truce ; and 6th, that the consuls or delegates of the powers
should exercise a supervision over the reforms. The suspension of arms
was more favourable to the Turks than to the Insurgents ; the Insurgents
understood this, and rejected it.

The refusal of England had the undesirable result first of troubling the
European concert, and of thus giving rise to opportunities of conflict and
struggles for influence which are always perilous ; secondly, of exciting the
confidence and arrogant pride of the Turks, by making them believe that
they could count on the support of England. As to the first point, it may
perhaps be pleaded, and with justice, that there had been too much parade
of the Triple Alliance, as if to the exclusion of the rest of the European
powers. The action of the English government may have been designed
as a protest against these pretensions. But on the second point, nothing so
favourable can be urged. It is all very well for the English cabinet to say
that it is not supporting Turkey. Its attitude has led to a contrary belief in
Europe, and especially at Constantinople, and anybody could have foreseen
that this would be so. Is it not mortifying and downright painful for
England and the friends of England on the continent, to see her giving
her moral support to a Power which only keeps its position by atrocities
such as those which have desolated Bulgaria, and have aroused the
indignation of all civilised Europe. The Bulgarians are, in the opinion
of all who know them, the most interesting of all eastern races.
They are laborious, honest, gentle, pacific. They have been ill-treated
constantly and systematically, and yet they have never revolted.
And now they find let loose upon them hordes of savages who lay
waste the country, burn the villages, outrage the women, and sclLthe
children for slaves. As is said by the Timca correspondent, who is no
Slavophil : — ‘‘ If the women of England could know the facts, there would
be such a cry of indignation that all Europe would rise in vengeance.*’
Even in Dahomey such frightful cruelties are unknown. What ought to
prevent any government with a spark of care for the rights of humanity
from supporting the Turks, is that these facts are no fortuitous occurrence ;
they are tlic inevitable comcquence of tlic 2 wsent situation of the Ottoman
Forte* The disciplined troops of Turkey are too few in number to struggle
against the rismg of the Christian populations. Recourse is therefore
necessaiy to the arms of true savages like the Bashi-Bazouks, the Cir-
cassians^ and the recruits who are arriving from Asia Minor. How is it
possible that men like these, without discipline, animated by the fury of
reUgioQS fanaticism, over-ozeiied, and then let loose among populations that

HOME AND FOEEIGN AFFAIES.

267

are peaceful enongb) but still are known to be unfriendly, — how is it possible
for such men not to give themselves up to every excess ? If Turkey is
victorious, who does not shudder at the thought of the fate that awaits the
vanquished ? And not even all these crimes and cruelties will save
Turkish supremacy. Sooner or later Bulgaria and Herzegovina will be
emancipated, as Boumania and Servia have been emancipated. The English
Conservatives have the odious distinction of being always ready to uphold
causes that are condemned by humanity and justice. They now seem to be
ranging themselves on the side of the cut-throats and ravishers in Bulgaria
— agreeing for once with the court of the Vatican, which calls upon all
countries to join England in defending Turkey. K they think they are
combatting Bussian influence by this action, they make a great mistake.
Bussia, in undertaking the defence of the unhappy peoples of the Balkan
Peninsula, hactil^idently the better and the nobler part. She is gaining all
over the world the sympathies of every friend of liberty and of the
deliverance of the oppressed ; and she is making sure of the affection of all
the Slaves, even in Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and throughout the
Banubian basin. The more favourable the attitude taken by Austria
towards the Turks, the more surely docs she alienate from herself the
attachment of her Slavic subjects, who form the majority of the Empire,
and the more surtdy also will she augment the influence and the ascendancy
of Bussia. If, on the contrary, Austria and England had taken in hand the
cause of the emancipation of the provinces that are crushed down and
ruined by Turkish domination, then there would have been no reason to
fear Bussia in these regions. Since Boumania has been free, it is certainly
not towards her powerful neighbour that she turns, nor would that be a
glad day for her on which she should bo encircled within a Bussian fron-
tier. The best, nay the only means of anticipating the triumph of
Panslavism, is to emancipate the Southern Slaves, so that, by forming a
more free and democratic centre of activity than Bussia, they may no
longer have any interest in union with her. That was the idea of Mazzini
and of Kossuth, and it was a just idea. When we reflect upon the situation
of the East, wo become persuaded of this capital truth, that all those who
are at this moment doing their best to sustain the Turks, are in fact doing
the work of Bussia, and preparing for her an inevitable supremacy in the
future. Free the Slaves from the Mussulman yoke, and they will insist on
remaining free. Keep them under their abhorred masters, and they will
throw themselves into the arms of Bussia as soon as they can.

One of the principal incidents of the month has been the interview at
Beichstadt. On the morning of tho 8th of July the Emperor Francis
Joseph awaited at Bodenbach the arrival of the Emperor Alexander, who
was leaving Jugenheim on his return home. The two Chancellors Andrassy
and Gortschakoff accompanied their sovereigns. After an hour’s journey by
train, carriages conveyed the illustrious company to the castle of Beichstadt.
In the afternoon tho two Emperors parted, after thrice embracing one
another in the most expansive fashion. This was the exterior aspect of
an interview on which depended at that moment the fate of Europe. As

268 HOME AHD FOEEIGN AFFAIES.

for what passed, it scorns that the most pacific resolutions were taken. It
must have been decided that no intervention should take place beyond the
Danube ; that they would await the results of the war ; and when the chance
of arms should have decided, then they would do their best together to
establish a durable peace, and to limit the consequences of victory. Neither
power was to act apart, and they were to do their best only to act in
concert with the other states of Europe. After the interview the Emperor
Francis Joseph proceeded to visit the Empress Dowager at Prague. He
seemed well pleased and very confident as to the future. A deputation of
manufacturers having demonstrated to him how much the empire needed
peace, he answered that he believed peace to be assured.

In the Italian parliament Count Maniiani questioned the government
upon the policy they meant to follow on the Eastern question. The
minister of foreign affairs replied that Italy meant to preserve her neutra-
lity, and that the principle of non-intervention would also bo accepted by
the other great powers. In the assembly at Versailles in answer to a
question by M. Louis Blanc relative to Eastern afiairs, the Due Decazes
answered in terms of great reserve. It cannot be well, he said, for France to
be mixed in any event in the East which might trouble the peace of the world.
She has no special aims of her own. She only unites in the efforts of the
other powers, who are aiming at narrowing the circle of the struggle, and will
only intervene to assist in the restoration of peace. Again, an understanding
by a confidential channel, which is confirmed at this moment, is a fact at
which all Europe ought to rejoice. The newspapers give very circumstan-
tial details, which have every appearance of truth, of an interview between
the Grand Duke Constantine of Bussia and M. Thiers. The policy of non-
intervention must at first have seemed very difficult to follow, said the
Grand Duke, because there is in Bussia a Panslavic party, of great power
and high spirit and exercising a great influence* over the Emperor. But
the Emperor was now resolved not to intervene except in favour of peace.
On the subject of the interview at Beichstadt, the Grand Duke is supposed
to have said : ' The two Emperors have always been perfectly agreed, or to
speak more exactly, they have recovered a perfect agreement, for in these
days people travel quickly in opposite directions.'

People attribute to the urgent advice of tho Emperor Alexander the
closing of the Austrian port of Klek in Dalmatia, by which the Turkish
fleet brought supplies to the troops in Herzegovina. In this Austria has
done no more than conform to the precepts of international law. So long
as Turkey had to do with insurgent subjects, as was the case in Herze-
govina, so long Austria, not having recognised the insurgents as belligerents,
was not in a position to close her porta to tho Turkish troops. But now that
Montenegro, an independent state, is at war with Turkey, Austria can no
longer allow the Turks to pass by her territory for the purposes of a
military operation.

London has also supplied pacific assurances to Europe. Lord Derby reply-
ing to deputations at the Foreign Office (July 14) showed that neither Russia
nor' Austria was in a position to make war ; that France, Italy, and
Germany had no interest in war ; and that England naturally was more

HOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

269

opposed to it than even the other States. He confirmed the accuracy of
the newspaper reports of the issue of the interview at Boichstadt, and
consequently ho concludes that in all probability peace will not be brohen.
Ho summed up in one very lively expression the attitude of England. We
are bound, he said, to prevent the murder of the sick man, but we have
no obligation to prevent natural death or suicide. Lord Derby's words gave
a certain relief in our own country, but the uneasiness which they abated
is again reviving. People ask why our fleet is still at Besika Bay, and
whether its presence there is not sure to be misinterpreted by the Turkish
government. Mr. Disraeli's way of answering questions upon Turkish
matters amuses the more shallow of his followers, but increases the general
distrust of him in serious politicians of all ways of thinking.

At the same time as symptoms so reassuring as those we have described,
there are some restless spirits who still persist in discerning certain menacing
clouds. In the number of these we must count, they say, the visits that have
taken place amongst the Sovereigns this spring. There have been repeated
interviews between the Emperor William and the Emperor Alexander. A few
days ago there was the meeting between the Emperor of Austria and the
Emperor of Russia in Bohemia. Now it is the Crown Prince of Italy who
hastens first to Berlin, and then to St. Petersburg. The Emperor William
goes as for as Wurzburg in search of Prince Bismarck who was probably a
good deal disconcerted at having his cure interrupted. Lord Odo Bussell
is of the party, and is not afraid of wearying the great chancellor. Finally,
the Emperor William repairs to Saltzburg to meet the Emperor of Austria,
and Lord Odo Bussell confers with their majesties. If the understanding
amongst States is in proportion to the number of interviews between their
Sovereigns, never can it have been closer. If all the world is agreed in
wishing peace, however, why these re-unions of the powerful of the earth ?
Again there arc incidents that burst like bombshells. At the end of last
mouth when all seemed to be calming down, it was Servia and Montenegro
who suddenly opened a campaign. Now, behold Boumania abruptly
bringing the knife to the throat of the Saltan, to obtain concessions
from him that are equivalent to the complete eradication of the
last vestiges of sovereignty ; and she is sending troops to the
Danubian frontier to defend a neutrality that nobody threatens. These
measures, in which it seems the Prince of HohenzoUern has taken the
initiative, are all the more strange as they do not seem to be agreeable
to the Roumanian Parliament. The Senate pronounces definitely for peace.
The country is contented : it has nothing to gain in a war against thp Porte,
for if the Porte were worsted, the advantage would fall to the Slaves and not
to the Boumanians. It is certainly no religious motive that will put arms
into the hands of the Wallachs. Watching the attitude of Prince Hohen-
zollem, one is inclined to believe that he is obeying the influence of those
who perhaps called the rising in Herzegovina into being, and who at any
rate made it enormously important. Daring the last year, each time that we
think we have arrived at an arrangement, some new incident breaks out
again to open the question. It is not yet possible to foresee what will be
the consequences of the attitude of Boumania. At presmit the probabiUtiee

270

HOME AND FOBEIOK AFFAIES.

still are that the war will remain local. The substance of the situation
has been summed up in a saying attributed to Prince Gortschakoff :
** We are very attached to the Danubian Slaves, our brethren, but we are
still more attached to the crown of our sovereign.’* In proportion' as the
summer advances, the chances of a great war grow less. A winter cam-
paign will be terribly trying for civilised troops, especially in Eastern
Europe.

In France the Republicans continue to give proof of their wisdom. In
order to keep the present ministry in power, and to spare the country a
crisis, they surrendered in the discussion of the Municipal Bill the immediate
application of a principle to which they cling — namely, the election of
mayor by the councils in all the communes. The Government concedes
this for the villages, but in the case of the towns it wishes to keep the
power in the hands of the central government, and they made it a cabinet
question. If the Republicans voted against the Government Bill, the
Bonapartists would have done the same, and the ministry would have fallen.
M. Gambetta persuaded his friends above all things to save the ministry.

We are, and we intend to remain, the wiser party,” he said ; in this
way we shall also be the stronger party.” And to a Bonapartist, who
asked him when then he would apply his principles, he answered, In
1879 1 ” — ^that is to say, when there will bo another president. Many
Republicans abstained, the Municipal Bill was passed, and the ministry kept
in office. The sacrifice thus made by the Radicals need not weigh very
heavily on their consciences. In perfectly free countries, where municipal
institutions have a very vigorous life of their own, in Belgium and in
Holland, countries of old autonomous communes, the burgomaster — that
is to say, the mayor — is appointed by the Government, even, it may be,
from outside the council.

A grave question has occupied the French Senate, the law namely for con-
ferring degrees. The Act which had been passed by the previous Chamber had
granted to private persons the right of founding universities, and had esta-
blished for the purpose of granting academic degrees, mixed juries composed
of the State professors and the professors of the free universities. This was
evidently an infringement of the prerogative of the State. If, for permis-
sion to practise as a doctor or an advocate you require proofs of capacity,
it is only the State that can measure them, for it is a matter of public order.
M. Waddington was therefore perfectly right in restoring to the State a
prerogative of which it ought never to have been deprived. The discus-
• sion was very keen and very brilliant. M. Challemel Lacour showed the
danger of entrusting the direction of superior instruction to a clergy that
is hostile to modem liberties. After M. Fouoher de Coreil, who replied
with great felicity to M. Wallon, M. Jules Simon and the Bishop of
Orleans descended into the arena. M. Simon’s speech was very
dexterous, very insmuating, and, as unctuous as a sermon ; it was, they
laid, St. Francis de Bales in the Yersailles tribune. Mgr. Dnpanlonp
spoke like a barrister. M. Laboulaye, who for isome time has seen free-
dom novrtmre btit in the clerical camp, spoke in favour of Catholic univer-'

HOME AND FOBEIGK APFAIBS.

271

Bities. M. Waddington defended the Bill with a vigour that ought to have
been decisive. He recalled to M. Laboulaye the opinion which he held iu
1670 — Liberty of instruction as extensive as possible, but the right of
conferring degrees never.” Finally, M. Dufauro, a very good Catholic for
all that, proceeded to defend the policy of the Government. But he did
not succeed, and was left in a minority.

The rejection of the Bill in the Senate is a great imprudence on the part
of the clericals and Conservatives. It will preserve a law to which they
cling, and which we confess is an excellent engine of war for the Church
in its attempts to make itself master of the State ; but on the other hand, it
will arouse against the party the animosity of the majority of the country.
It will be the first time that France has felt the hand of the bishops arresting
the will of the nation. The galleries of Yersaillcs were filled with priests
and women of the world, their friends. It was felt to bo the struggle of
Catholicism with modem liberty. The defeat, however, cannot be final,
and M. Waddington already announces his intention of bringing the Bill in
again next year. Meanwhile the tolerably patient attitude of the Bepub-
lican majority in face of this vexatious disappointment shows that M.
(rambetta*s power over his party has sulTorcd no diminution.

The Italian Ministry has succeeded in passing its measure for the
purchase of the North Italian Hallways, and they leave undecided the
important question, who is to manage them, the State or a coihpany. By
this means the Depretis Ministry has kept the support of the Florentine
party and the majority. On the other hand it has suifered a check in con-
nection with the establishment of Punti Franchi in certain ports, at Venice,
at Genoa, at Leghorn. It is desirable that the Italian Government should
not be renewed every season. Once a year may perhaps be allowed to be
at least often enough.

It is to be hoped that the technicalities of an Education Bill will not
prevent the public from grasping the true scope of what the Government
are doing, or from perceiving that the details of a grant, or the introduction
of a few words in a subdivision of a clause, may go to the very root of the
most organic questions of national life. We are now seeing the results of
Mr. Forster’s education policy in 1870. What Mr. Forster ought to have
said in 1870 is this : — ** It would involve too sudden a break in educational
arrangements at once to withdraw all aid from the denominational schools.
Let them remain for the present as they ore. But not one more of them
will receive any aid or recognition whatever from Government. Educa-
tion is recognised as a public duty, to be provided for mainly by public
money, and therefore to be supervised and administered by public bodies.”
That was the one broad truth which a real statesman would have impressed
upon parliament and the country. It was definite, intelligible, and in the
only line of national progress. Such denomihatiozial schools at already
existed were to be treated as tolerated exceptions i public schools, under
the control of public bodies, were to be the one recogttised<type« What
happened we know only too well. Hr, Forster exprendy invited what

m

HOME AND tOBEIGN AFFAIES.

ought to have been the exceptional schools, receiving public money on
sufferance, to multiply themselves and to receive more public money. The
recent policy of the Conservative Government is the result of Mr. Forster^s
incohcrencies, ivhich confused public opinion, clouded principles, and
paralysed the party. No one ever seriously expected the government of
1670 to abandon the sectarian schools on the instant, but if the principle
had been definitely laid down, and accepted, as in 1870 it certainly would
have been, by parliament, that the sectarian schools were to be extinguished
as rapidly as was compatible with educational convenience, then Lord
Sandon*s present action would have been distinctly and unmistakably a
direct reversal of a declared and accepted piece of policy. And from such
a reversal the Ministry would have shrunk as cautiously ns they have
shrunk from restoring the Irish Church, or repealing the Irish Land Act.

When Lord Sandon's Dill was introduced in May, we described its merits
as chiefly negative. Since then at least one very important deduction has
to be made from this eulogy. The principle which Mr. Forster never
perceived. Lord Sandon does not concede, and he carries the matter some-
what further. It has hitherto been necessary for the managers of a
sectarian school, nominally called voluntary, to provide a certain amount of
justification for their name in the shape of private subscriptions. The
government now take up the position that this condition is inexpedient, smd
that the grant paid by the State to these schools should be virtually inde-
pendent of the amount of private subscriptions. What does that come to
in plain English ? To this, that the State is going to provide the money
for schools, and the clergy and clerically-minded laymen are to have the
management of them. This is a breach of modern political principle that
would astonish people beyond measure, if they had not been taught by the
timorous and shifty empiricism of the legislation of 1870 already to
acquiesce in a more partial infraction of the same principle. Lord Sandon
only hands over a little more public money to private bodies.

But this is not all. From these private bodies one half of the nation are
practically excluded. This is the real grievance of the Dissenter. It deals
a blow at him, not as a religious professor, but as a citizen. No doubt it is a
most serious thing to him to see, as he will see under Lord Sandon’s Bill, his
children driven by law into a Church school. There is a conscience clause
no doubt, and it may be loyally observed or not. But, however loyally it
may bo observed, how would churchmen feel if they saw their children driven
bylaw into Boman Catholic schools ? Htill, we repeat, this is not the side
from which we, at least, are most anxious to see the subject considered by
libend politicians. It is the civil disability of which we complain, more even
than of the outrage on religious scruple. What the Dissenter in evdry rural
parish in England will see is this : a school, paid for by public money, filled
by means of a public law, and its teacher instructing his, the Dissenter’s,
children; and yet he, the parent and the citizen, is to have no more
voice, direct or indirect, in the choice of the managers, or the choice
of file teacher, or the discipline of the school, or. any other matter
vAatCvcri than if the school to which for the future the Rector need
not cont#nte a penny, were the Rector’s drawing-room or the Rector’s

EOIOB ASS FOBSIOK ASFAIBS.

m

garden. How do yoa expect elemeniaxy edaeation to be popnlar?
Do yon not see that yon are adding to the necessary inconvenience of
compulsion the gratuitous odium of sectarian privilege ? And how can yon
persist that your Establishment, for whose wretched sake all this is main-
tained, does not divide our people into two, an^ lower our whole type of
national life ? See what happened not many weeks ago at Cricklade. All
the children attending a Church school were invited to a special gathering:
the little dissenters were placed at one side, and the little churchpeopla on
the other ; prizes were given to the latter, while the former were told by
the Vicar that as they did not come to church, there were no prizes for
them ; finally by a grotesque touch that could only have occurred to an
ecclesiastic, the church children sat down to tea, while the dissenters were
marched round the tables and then bowed out by their gracious host. The
case may seem trivial, and if it were solitary, it might really be so. But
everybody who takes the trouble to note down the number of cases of a
similar sort, knows that the instance is typical. Mr. Bright, in a speech
which makes his friends wish that he had always been able to take as
important a part in education debates (July 21), very apnositely quoted the
remark of the President of tho Wesleyan Conference last year, that there
ore hundreds of parishes in England and 'Wales ir Wi.ich there is no social
freedom whatever, and if the child of a dissenting family were withdrawn
from the Church school even under the protection of a Conscience Clause, h
mark would be set upon that family. Of course th's is so, and is known to
be so by Conservative members of parliament, as well as by other people.
Here is a case that comes under one's eye in the morning paper of to-day *
** In the village of Hullavington, near Malmesbury, Wilts, there is a church
school which provides sufficient school accommodation for the district.
There are also in the same village a Baptist chapel and Sunday school
which were recently enlarged. On the occasion of the completion of the
buildings a tea party was held, whereupon the Rev. •— the clergyman of

the place, sent out a circular. * The Rev. has made up his mind that

all those parents who can afford to send their children to the tea party to-
day cannot want any help, also the children cannot come to the school feast
in August.’ ”

It is only an ecclesiastic here or there who is imprudent enough to act
up to his prejudices in so bold a way as this, but for one of them who
teases and persecutes indiscreetly, there are a thousand who tease and
persecute with a quiet discretion that is just as effective. Yet these are
the men, and the kind of men, to whom the State is going to hand over in
as many oases as possible so important an institution as the school, and so
important a function as that of the instruction of the people. Of eourse if
the imparting of elementary instruction be a national funotion to be sup*
ported by State funds, then it ought like other functionB of the same
kind to be performed by civil and secular bodies.

Besides offering to pay public money to the deiical managers of the
sectarian schools, even if there be not a diilling of private subscription^
the Oovermnent hove changed their measure in tire aame dueetion fay
another q^tsration in the original Bill. Thqr have ss netione d a douse

TOL. ZX. ir.S. T .

fHH HOKB Am) mmoK AiFms.

•mpcnransg localities in which there is a School Board without schools to
hftva Che Board dissolved. The argument of the Government is that such
boards were only chosen in order to secure a body with the power of
enforcing attendance at the schools ; and now that this power is conferred
by the new Bill on such bodies as Councils and Boards of Guardians, the
School Board in such cases will have no further office to fulfil. The
answer to this is that in abolishing School Boards, we are abolishing the
organizing machinery for any new schools that may be required. A School
Board may be useless for the moment except for passing compulsory bye*
laws, but who is to say that to-morrow the accommodation of a given
locf^ty may not become insufficient, and in that case what has become of
the machinery for repairing the deficiency ? Mr. Playfair justly describes
the whole manoeuvre. A few days ago,** he said, ** a clause had been
passed, tbo effect of which would bo to transform [sectarian] schools into
private adventure schools with Government subventions. The design of
the new clause [giving power of dissolving School Boards] was to make all
the existing schools become Denominational in character. If the clause
passed, there would be continuous agitation in many places on the part of
the minority opposed to School Boards ; parishioners would be polled at
great expense ; and this sectarian warfare would involve all the incon-
veniences that are urged as objections to the Permissive Bill.**

Well, let it be so. We shall have nearly universal compulsion, though
we shall have it in a clumsy and roundabout way. That is clear gain, so
far as it goes. And it will prove a gain ultimately to have the ecclesiastical
principle of education placed squarely in front of the civil principle. The
grosser the abuse, the greater the probability of a thorough and trenchant
remedy. The Liberals will hardly come back to power, until they are
prepared to withdraw every farthing of public money from every sectarian
school in the country, and to organize public instruction on strictly political
and non-ecclesiastical principles. There will be an end of the parliamen-
tary grant to any school not under the control of a public representative
body.

37, 187S.

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. GXYII. New Sebies.— Seftembeb 1, 1876.

TURKEY IN EUROPE.^

L

Ox tho Snd of July, 1875, Mr. Holmes, the British Consul in
Bosnia, reported to Lord Derby that there was “ disturbance in the
Herzegovina.’*

Tho Governor-General,” Mr. Holmes was informed, “ had at present no
intention of sending troops against tho insurgents, but will prevent their
efforts to extend their revolt % surrounding their districts with policemen,
and he will probably send some of the notables of Sorajevo to endeavour to
biing them to reasou.”

Such were the small beginnings of the insurrection, which con-
tinued and extended its course until, on the 2nd July, 1876, the
Turkish Minister for Foreign Affairs was telegraphing to the
Turkish Ambassador in London that Servia and Montenegro had
declared war against the Porte.

As to the origin of the insurrection, Mr. Holmes wrote as
follows : —

*‘Early last winter, somo hundred and sixty-four of tho inhabitants of the
district of Novossiu left their homes and went into Montenegro. After
i*emaining there somo months, however, they petitioned tho Porte to be
allowed to return to Nevessin. The Governor-General advised the Porte to
roply, that as they had chosen to leave their country for Montenegro, they
might remain there. The Government, however, decided to accept their
request, and allowed them to return. Shortly afterwards they appeared in
revolt, declared that they were oppressed, refusing to pay their taxes, or to
admit tho police among ^em, and they have been endeavouring by intimida-
tion to cause their neighbours in the surrounding districts to join ^em. The
Mutesarif of Mostar invited them to come to that place to state their grievances,
which he assured them would be redressed, but they refused, and the Govemor-
Goneral tells me that they cut to pieces a man quite unconnected with them
who had gone to Mostar to seek redross for some grievance, and threatened with
the same fhte any within their reach who should do so in future.”

A few days later, writes Mr. Holmes, the disaffected peasants

(1) Papers presented to Parliament by command of her Majesty: TuAur, No. 2,
Ho. 8, and No. 4, -1876.

VOT* XX. N.B.

V

276

TVEfET IN EUBOPB.

attacked and captured a caravan laden with ricc^ sugar, and coffee ;
murdered and decapitated five Turkish travellers ; drove away forty
police placed in the defile of Stolat;: ; intercepted various roads, and
made them unsafe for traA'clling Mussulmans ; and, finally, “ are
endeavouring to force others to join them by burning the houses of
those who refuse to do so, and by other moans of intimidation/*

Towards the end of the third month from the beginning of the
insurrection. Consul Holmes was joined with the Consuls of the
other Great Powers in a mission, the jmrposo of which was to assure
the insurgents that the Great Powers would give them no aid, and
to advise them to communicate directly with the agents of the Porte,
which was prepared to consider their complaints. From the report
of Mr. Holmes of the failure of this mission, we take a passage
which completes the British Consurs view of these transactions : —

“I do not hesitate to dcclaro that the oppression in the Herzegovina in
general is greatly exaggerated by the Christians, and that the discontent which
undoubtodl 5 ’’ exists against most of the chief Turkish landowners, and against
tho Zaptichs and tax-farmers, has been the excuse rather than the cause of
the revolt, which was assurodly arrangtnl by Servian agitators and accomyjlishcd
by force. The mass of the inhabitants, nnannod, had no choice. Their houses
were devastated and their lives tlireatoiicd, and thej' wore ordered to follow
their leaders. And now the ruin is siicli that thoso wlio wish to submit cannot.
They have no homes to go to, and tho aimed bands threaten all who breathe a
whisper of submission.”

But the origin of tho insurrection was traced from an earlier
period by the Consul of another Great Power. That Consul begins
by saying that the insurrection was caused by unusual maladmiuis-
tration, and then proceeds : —

“ There were no foreign influences which caused tho movement, but cases of
unusual maladministration.

*'In tho district of Nevesinjo the farmers of taxes, tho Christian Stanko
Perinovo, of Mostar (at present a refugee in Bagusa), and tho Mahomodans
Porto and Ali Beg Redjipasics, endeavoured to collect tho tithes with more
than usual rigour and arbitrary power. TJio year 1874 had been a failure ; in
spite of this the tax-farmers had, according to their practice, vuluedr the crops
higher than the real proceeds, and instead of .taking their share immediately
a^r the harvest, they came to do so in January,, 1875. The peasants, in order
to live, had in the meantime sold a portion of the crops, or refused to comply
with the exaggerated demands. This gave rise to all sorts of violence, people
were depriv^ of all they had, and ^ose who had little were beaten and
imprisoned. The * Kuezes ’ (village chiefs), who complained to the Kaimakam
on this proceeding of the tithe-farmers, were insulted and threatened with
arrest. To escape ficom this they fled to Montenegro, where they arrived on
the20thofPebrua^. . . .

^*In the meantime the tithe-fanners in Nevesixje continued their work,
comnatting all sorts of injustice and violence, in which they were assisted by
the Zaptid^, or native gendarmerie. All complaints to the Eaimakani being
in Mndn, the Christians decided to avoid the Eassaba, or district town, and
dedmed tp do any corvSe, This resistance led to oounter-measures on the part
of the enthorities, which intimidated some, but exaggerated the great majority
ie such k point that, refusing to work for their landlords, they yrent wiih their

TUMET IN EUROPE. 277

cattle to the mountains, and some of them sent over their families and goods t o-
Montenegro.”

He goes on to say that in the end of March, in another district,
called Bilck, severity and cruelty in enforcing an unusually severe
task of forced labour so exasperated the people, who had lost so
much time with forced labour, that the chiefs of the clans decided
to refuse not only this work, but every other, to keep aloof from
the town, and to disobey the summons to appear before the tribunal ''
in respect of the unperformed comie. Ultimately most of the people
took refuge in the mountains, while some of tho chief men joined
those from Nevosinje in Montenegro. In May, Dervish Pasha, the
Governor-General, invited the refugees in Montenegro, as well as
those in tho mountains, to return, promising an amnesty. Some
of those who returned were murdered. Other fugitive peasants,,
returning to another Aullagc, were subsequently murdered. Then
some of the peasants got arms, probably from Montenegro. Gradu-
ally it became known that they liad resolved to demand the
execution of the long-promised refonns (the reforms, in fact, of the
firmans of 1839 and 1850,' though these documents, so familiar
as achievements of diplomacy, were quite unknown to the poor
peasants) ; and also the abolition of tithc-farmiiig, of forced labour,
and of the employment of the police as tax-collectors. The demand
of real religious equality exasperated in the highest degree every
Mussulman ; tho other demands exasi)erated the tithe-farmers and
the official class, Tho Governor-General was inclined to concilia-
tion, promised to use his influence at Constantinople in favour of
concession, and meanwhile refused to give tho Mussulmans arms.

When the Ivaimaham communicates this to the Mussulmans they reply
that they would defend themselves, and under tho lead of Ali Bey Bedjiparic ‘
they break into the Government stoi'o and take all tho breechloaders and
ammunition.

“ Thus, at the end of June both parties in Nevesinjo stood face to face ready
to fight, the Christians with few arms and no ammunition, and without know-
ing whether and by whom they might be supported. In tho other districts
people were waiting to see what Nevesinjo would do, but taking care not to
provoke the Turks.

It would still have been in the power of tho Government to prevent the
rising collecting at once a sufficient force to keep in check the Mussul-
mans.”

This, however, was not done, and the insurrection begins, not
quite in the way described by Consul Holmes : —

** On the Ist of July the Mussulmans, who, provided with ams, patrolled
Ihiough the plain of Nevesinje, kill some Christians who had returned ill to
their homes. On this the Christians, divided into four bands, lay an ambuidi
for the Turks, and succeed already on the 3rd m surrounding and massaoiing

(1) Is ithis personage the before-mentioned AU Bedyipasfos P

u2

378

TUBEET IK EimOPE.

a baad of Turks ; and on the 6th they attack a column of provisions, escorted
by frontier guards and armed citizens, and take away forty-seven horses. On
the 7th there is another such small fight.’*

From these two narratives can probably be drawn a tolerably
accurate picture of the real events.

In the Herzegovina, as in Bosnia, the condition of things is
auch that an insurrection is always justified, if it is likely to be
•successful. The tyranny of a dominant religion is more active,
end more constantly injurious, arrogant, and oppressive there,
than in other provinces, because its members are far more
numerous in proportion to the whole population, and include
the owners of the land. The condition of the people is worse,
because, though in no Turkish province is there in practice any
limit to the exactions of the tithe-farmer and tax-farmer, in the
•Herzegovina and Bosnia these persons and the police, who are their
.agents, belong, the latter quite, and the former almost exclusively,
to the dominant religion : and consequently there is no public
'Opinion to qualify the spirit of exaction. For the same reason the
system of forced labour takes more oppressive forms there than
•elsewhere ; and justice, which has to be bought almost everywhere in
Turkey, is worst of all administered there, where the Mussulmans
4ire numerous enough to fill all the judicial places, as well as to bo
■parties and to furnish witnesses in almost every suit. Last of all, the
•cultivators are tenants at will, without conditions, of landlords not of
^another order only, but of another religion. In such provinces, it
may be truly said that there is no limit to exactions ; no man can
•call anything his own ; and industry, on the part of Christians at all
•events, is useless except to the extent required to furnish the barest
necessaries. If there could be any refuge for a people in such
conditions of life, it must be in a strong executive. But the
Oovemor-Oeneral and the chief officials of a Turkish province,
receive and lose their offices at the will of the remote court. No
part, indeed, of the Turkish system of government is a more
jfrequent subject of complaint on the part of foreign Consuls, than
this uncertain and generally short tenure of the highest offices ; and
.a Turkish provincial executive always may be, and generally is, at
•once the weakest and the most oppressive in the world. In
mother parts of European Turkey the condition of things may be
more than tolerable. But in Bosnia and the Herzegovina, oppression
extends to the smallest as well as the largest affairs and is ever
f>re8en:t.^

. (1} We extract from a most interesting ** Glance at Grievances*’ (Blue Book, Turkey,
SNTs* 2, p. 80), the following account of one among the many forms of oppression usual
the Bjann^vina. Any one who has seen, or read accounts of, the methods of
^Oriental finance and administration, when not chocked by an occasional Akbar or

TUBKEY IN EUROPE,

27»

Upon the majority of a subject population^ the effect. of such a
state of things, when continued for generations, is that they become
scarcely conscious of their degraded condition. Theso are the easy
tempered and submissiye, whoso spirits arc broken, and who have
no desire beyond the instinctive wish to preserve their lives. "No
doubt in most oven of these bitter resentments slumber, capable of
being roused. Of the minority of such a population — the bold and
spirited — on the other hand, not a few must be given to acts of
violence and brigandage. Srigandage becomes a form of patriotism ;
and even the better sort of people may prefer the chances of an
insurrection or war to the misery and monotony of subjection.
When hopes of foreign aid,'Or unusual wrongs, provoke a rising,,
these are the men who plunder caravans for the military chest, and
burn the houses of their kinsmen for. recruits. It is not a noble^
commencement of possible freedom, but its want of nobleness is one-
of the results of Turkish rule.

Several circumstances favoured the rising of July, 1875, and^
have contributed to make its course, unlike that of the score*
or more of risings which have happened in various provinces
of Turkey since 1858, a question of European concern, and a
chapter of future history. At the time of the outbreak, the*
weak or careless policy of the Grand Vizier Mahmoud, or mere*
want of funds, had left the insurgent districts with barely sufficient

by English rule, will at once recognize the extreme probability that not a trifle is-
exaggerated.

The method of collecting the tithes is as follows ; —

** PriTato fanners buy the tithes by auction to tho highest bidder, and it not unfre-
quenUy happens that the produce is not equivalent to tho exorbitant price paid to-
the Government by the farmers, and, as the latter wish to make a good profit anyhow,
it follows that they avail themselves of any means to do so, and these are tho most
unjust extortion and arrogance. For exam^e, tho confederate speculators arrive in the*
'villages of which they have bought the tithes, bringing with them their followers and
horses. There they mostly behave os absolute masters, and they live at the expense of,
the poor peasants, who have to provide them with all they require for eating and
drinking to any extent they please. There are, however, some rare exceptions to this-
conduct. So great is tho expense of supplying the wi^nts of these voracious oppressors,
that the poor people are often obliged to borrow from thorn at usurious interest the very
means to provide for them.

** The ‘ spahi ’ or farmers of the tithes ought to see the thrashing of tho grain, and*
when it is measured they ought to fix the proper tithes ; but it is very difficult to get
them to do this, for the most blustering and powerful tithe-farmers buy the tithes of
many villages, and as they cannot be present at all of them, and will not trust to-
others, it is their pleasure to fix the tithes by an approximate colculatioa (* tamin ’) in.
which, of course, they set down more than ^ere is. In vain the owner complains; he
must be satisfied with his assessment, for he knows very wdl that the fiirmers are sure*
of Government support, and not unfrequently some of the most influential members of
the Government act in concert with the speculating tithe-farmers.

*'lt happens in many places, especially where there are fields, that the tithe-fumer
leaves his grain as it were in deposit in some poor hut or shed in the village, with no
one to look alter it, and then if any damage or loss occurs, the peasants of the village
are. bound to make it good ” — and so on, beyond our limits for q;aotatioa«

1280

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

troops for the most necessary garrisons ; nor for many iroeks was
there an appreciable increase in the Imperial forces. By their
knowledge of this, not only the insurgent leaders themselves, but
the Slavonic committees in the adjoining Austrian fprovinces, were
no doubt encouraged to unusual exertions ; while from the very
earliest moment aid had doubtless come from Montenegro ; and this
increased as time passed, until the foreign Consul, from whose
report we have already quoted, was able to write, in words no doubt
roughly accurate, that towards the end of August “Montenegro
now came forward as protector of the movement, and men, arms,
and ammunition have come ever since from there.” But another
spring of unwonted energy flowed from a more exalted , quarter.
'WTiile the refugees from Nevosinje and Bilek were at the Court of
the Prince of Montenegro, the Emperor of Austria had visited
Dalmatia. Words of warm sympathy with his Slavonic subjects,
such as arc not unusual and are certainly most becoming in the
mouth of a Ilapsburg Prince, no doubt fell, during the visit, from
the Emperor. The meaning of these words, as they were reported
from village to village, was exaggerated. It became the common
topic of the bazaars that by purchase or otherwise the provinces
bordering on Dalmatia, of the trade of which the ports of Dalmatia
are the natural outlet, were about to pass into the hands of th<J
House of Ilapsburg. And gradually, as is reported, “ The Chris-
tians, with all their indolence, could not but take up the idea that
this was so, and conceive hopes that their deliverance was at hand.”

II.

An apology is due for the length of the preliminary quotations and
remarks that haA^e been made. But they suggest an answer to the
assumptions which haA^e underlain every dispatch and every speech
of the British Government on the question of this rising, until,
within the last six Aveeks, the faint dawn of different ideas has
appeared. Those assumptions are (1) that Austria and Bussia, one
almost exclusively, and the other to a very largo extent, a Slavonic
power, and obliged to reckon with Slavonic opinion, could, so long as
there was no real promise of an improvement in the condition of tho
Christians, be reasonably expected to use the means necessary, — and in
some quarters nothing short of force would have been sufficient, — ^to
cut ofE the insurrection from the support of the neighbouring popula-
tions ; and (2) that the insurgents themselves could Avithout extreme
cruelty be asked to put faith in the promises of tho Porte. It will
startle some readers of the papers presented to Parliament, to see the
sort of suiprise and indignation with which Lord Derby, the British
Ambassador at Constantinople, and most of the British Consuls
(though most notably Mr. Holmes), for months treat thq omission to

• TURKEY IK EUROPE. 281

etarvo tho insurroction as an offence combining the worst features of
political and even moral guilt.

Very early in the rising, the Sultan’s Government invoked the
aid and the advice of the great Powers. Tho task before them,
though difficult, had some favourable aspects. The rising was limited
to parts of a province which itself was at the extreme north-western
corner of the Ottoman dominions ; was connected with the rest of the
empire by no more than a few miles of territory interposed between
two practically independent principalities; and while its social
arrangements were more complicated, the class bitterness and
oppression more intense, and tho maladministration more grave than
those of other provinces, these very circumstances suggested special
treatment, and gave hope that the disorder might be kept within tho
limits of its origin.

In the course of last autumn and tho early part of winter, several
of the correspondents of the newspapers of England, France, and
America (not always a class so ill-informed, or so foolish in their
ideas, as is maintained in some quarters), strongly urged the plan of
the annexation of these provinces to Austria. The advantages of
such a change are obvious. Their separation from the harbours of
the Dalmatian coast, and the separation of the harbours from the
prorinces, are mutually injurious in tho highest degree. Moreover,
what is wanted in the provinces is exactly what Austria can
furnish, not i)crhaps in the highest form, but adequately: a strong
government, able to keep peace between the hostile religions; to
respect and protect property ; to impose taxes of known amount, and
to allow no more to be collected in its name ; to appoint proper judges
and to pay them properly ; to make roads. And, lastly, annexation to
Austria would moan for the Bosnians and Ilerzegovinians union with
a large population of the same race as themselves.

Naturally this plan had warm friends throughout Dalmatia,
droatia, and Slavonia. Nor can it be doubted that, in the head-
quarters of tho Austrian army and among not a few of tho politicians
of Vienna, tho policy— call it of territorial aggrandisement, of
•extending the civilising mission of Austria, or of mitigating the
•domination of the Magyars — ^had, and perhaps has, eager and^ sturdy
advocates. There is some reason to think that in the early part of
the autumn, at any rate, tho wishes of the Imperial Court itself
inclined in this direction.

There is no evidence of what would have been the action of Russia,
liad this idea been adopted. Yet at least it may be said that
Bosnia and the Herzegovina are remote from Russia ; t^t the Govern-
ment of Russia is in the hands of a firm, cautious, and far-seeing
statesman, and of a most pacific Czar; and that neither her army
nor her people are ready for war on a great scale.

282

TUBEET IK EUROPE.

But the question need not be asked. The Austro-Hungarian
Government of itself decided against all plans of annexation. The
policy of that Government is still determined by the necessity of
satisfying the Magyars. And the Magj^ars^ whether from a wise con-
servatism, or from a narrow and jealous provincialism, will not
tolerate an addition to the already vast numbers of the Slavonic
subjects of the House of Hapsburg. Ho one, indeed, it may be here
observed, can read the papers presented to Parliament without
seeing that Magyar policy (jniv ct simple) is satisfied with nothing
so well as with the status quo ; and, if that could be restored and
maintained, would gladly leave to the tender mercies of Turkc}’’ the
future fate of her Christian subjects. Influences at Vienna in favour
of a more generous policy have partly come from non-Hungarian
quarters ; have partly been imposed by the necessity of events.

Assuming annexation to Austria to have been impossible, and the
British desire, — of seeing the insurrection put down at once by force,
and the population left to the chance of Turkish reforms,— to have
been disappointed ; — what remained ?

There remained, first, the possibility of autonomy. Rut the very
circumstances which justified the insurrection, spoke strongly against
autonomy. Extlremc misgovernment, religious and class hatreds,
oppression in many forms, agrarian confusion, are not favourable
antecedents for an independent State ; though an insurrection is an
efiective, as it is also an instinctive, mode of appealing to the
world against them. The position of Bosnia and Herzegovina in
these respects was in marked contrast to that of Bulgaria. For
Bulgaria had a quiet, industrious, orderly population ; mainly of the
same race and creed ; with comparatively few Mahommedans, and it
was growing steadily in wealth and intelligence. Ho denunciationa
could be better foimded than those so often uttered by the lute Lord
Strangford against the agitators, who, for political purposes, sought
to tempt or to intimidate into insurrection the villagers of Bulgaria.
Far better to wait till the time was ripe for them to enter quietly
into the independence for w^hich circumstances and their character
were preparing them. But, had the hour struck, had independence
been attainable without the risks of devastation and massacre, Lord
Strangford would have been the first* to afiirm that the Bulgarian
people on both sides of the Balkan were fit for self-government.

There remained, further, annexation partly to Montenegro and
partly to Servia, or wholly to one or the other ; and there remained
the alternative of improved administration under the Porte.

It is important to learn the opinion of Austria on these alter-
natives : — important, but by no means conclusive, for in these papers
there is proof that Count Andrassy may hold an opinion very
strongly, and yet afterwards see the wisdom of changing it for

TUBKEY m EUROPE.

283

' another, to be held not less strongly, not loss loyally ; and besides,
Count Andrassy^s opinion, so far as it is an Hungarian opinion, may
be in conflict with an Austrian as well as a Slavonic opinion : and,
out of conflicts of opinion come compromises. Subject to these
qualifications, it must be said, that the official Austro-Hungarian
opinion, several times expressed in these papers, is decidedly opposed
to the annexation of any part of the insurgent districts to either of
the Principalities, on the ground that “Austria-Hungary will then
have to support the claims of her own Croats on Turkish Croatia.’’

Hut on all these points the English Cabinet had before them some
evidence as to the wishes of the insurgents themselves. Our readers
will recall the mission of the Consuls, which in the third month of
the insurrection was sent to warn the insurgents against reliance on
the Great Powers, and to urge them to enter into direct ncgociations
with, and to have confidence in, the Porto.

“ Wo ” (tho English, French, and Russian Consuls) “ entirely failed,” writes
Mr. Holmes, on his return from tho mission (Sojitombor 24th), p. 23, ‘'to
persuade the insurgents wo met to submit, and to bring thoir complaints before
Server Tasha. We did not, however, scjo any of the principal chiefs of the
insuiTection, who wore all in the neighbourhood of Trebigne.

‘‘Our colleagues of Austria, Germany, and Italy returned on the 23rd,
having bcon equally unsuccessful. Thej', however, saw tho leaders of the
insurrection near Trebigne, who demand an annistice and an European inter-
vention to guarantee the reforms which may bo adopted. 1 would here remark
that, contrary to what is asserted in so many newspapers, tho people of the
Herzegovina neither demand, nor have over desired, an impossible autonomy,
as Servian agitators would have pei’suadcd them to do. They only ask ta
remain subjects of tho Sultan, with reformed laws, and a proper and just
administration of them.”

In an elaborate dispatch, dated the 28th of September, Mr*
Holmes writes : —

"Tho chiefs of the insurgents demand an European intervention and an
armistice to allow them to consult and assemble at any place which might he
fixed to discuss their affairs. They do not, and never have desired independ-
ence or annexation to Montenegro, but they wish to i;emam Turkish subjects
under very extensive administrative reforms, the execution of which to be
guaranteed by Europe.”

And as to the Bosnians : —

" In Bosnia, almost to a man, the population would refuse^ to be
annexed to Servia or to Austria, and they have never dreamt of independence,
which, from tho nature of circumstances and the state of education, is imprac-
ticable. They also only wish to be governed with justice, and placed on an
equality in law with thoir Mussulman compatriots.”

(1) The testimony, repeatedly given, of Mr. Freeman, about this time established
as acting consul at Bosna-Serai, is always that nothing will induce the Bosnian insur-
gents to' come again under Turkiidi rule. Probably the majority of the people were
indifferent about the means, provided they could live under an impartial and honest
administration.

284

TUBKEY IN EUROPE.

And the Consul of another great Power, to whom we have already
referred, wrote about the same time : —

** The people do not want to revolt against tlio Sultan, but against the native '
Mussulmans.”

Under these circumstances, and with information no 'doubt of the
same general kind before them, the policy initiated by the two great
Slavonic Powers — the policy wdiich seemed to them to give a hope
for the restoration pi peace — ^^vas that which, subsequently to the
date of the Berlin memorandum, was described by Count Andrassy
as the policy of the “ status quo ameliore/^ And the first stage in
this policy was the presentation to the Porte, on the Slst of January,
.with the approval and support, of the other great Powers, of the
document known as the Andrassy note, and the promise of the Porte,
in reply, that it would “ carry out four of the reforms proposed in the
note in all their integrity,” and would give effect to the principle
of the fifth.

To this scheme the English Cabinet, on the 25th of January,
promised a general support, which was, in fact, accorded at Con-
stantinople before the end of the month. On the 13th of May the
two Slavonic Powers, again having the cordial concuiTence of
Germany, invited the concurrence of the English Government to
further proposals, subsequently known as the Berlin Memorandum,
in pursuance, as they alleged, of the same policy. What, in the
intervening hundred and odd days, had happened to justify either
these proposals, or the unconditional refusal of the English Govern-
ment to accept them even as a basis for negotiation ?

We propose to answer this question by showing from the papers
presented to Parliament, w'hat, in the end of May, w'us the evidence
possessed by the English Cabinet as to the conduct of the Turkish
officials in the insurgent provinces, and as to the prospects of their
success in giving effect to the promises made by the Porte.

Before doing this, we affirm that, at the time the AndrSssy
note received the assent of the Porto, only the most sanguine
diplomacy could have conceived it possible that that transaction
would put an end to the insurrection. What did it offer P Only
this ; — ^that, if the Turk should fail to protect the returning insur-
gents and refugees, and to give effect to its renewed and enlarged
promises of reform, then, at some quite undefined and probably most
remote time, and in some wholly undefined manner — ^tho manner
and the time sure to depend almost entirely on the course of public
opinion in* foreign countries — the great Powers would exact the
fulfilment of the once more broken promises. And what, on the
othrnr hand, did it expect in return P That, after a most hopeful
. msurreotion had begun, the insurgents would lay down their arms

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

286

and rotiirn into the midst of Agas and Beys exasperated by the
destruction of tbeir property, Zaptiehs and Tithe-Farmers enraged by
the loss of their profits and the attempt to take away their occupa-
tion, and the whole body of Mussulmans infuriated by the arrogant
claims of the infidels, the formidable rising of a subject population,
and the murder of many of their own kindred. Was it not a little
sanguine to expect such results from such a measure ?

It is due to the English Cabinet to say that they^ at least, had bound
their country by no promises. The purpose of ttefr policy was to dis-
arm the insurgents and see Turkish rule quietly restored. For its
reform they had the most amiable wishes ; but they repudiated all
responsibility. Twice in four months was the name of England
employed to take arms out of the hands of an insurgent population,
without (so far as England was concerned) substituting* any security
whatever for the fair hopes that lay in those arms.

To proceed with the evidence that the conduct of the Ottoman
Government and its agents between January and the middle of May
justified the act of the British Government on the Berlin Memorandum.
On the 4th of March Wassa Eflcndi, declared by Sir Henry Elliot to
be a man of energy, and in earnest in the duty confided to him, an
Albanian by birth, and a lioman Catholic in religion,’’ was appointed
by the Porte to superintend the reforms in the Herzegovina and
especially to provide for the return of the refugees. But Sir Henry
Elliot is obliged to write further as follows : —

“ I asked Wassa Effondi also what power ho would have of executing prompt
and summary punishment in the cose of outrages against the refugees, and I
cannot say that his answer is satisfactory.

There will bo three different authorities in the provinces, all more or loss
independent, between whom some jealousy is pretty sure to arise ; and I cannot
find that any of them possesses the power of carrying out a summary capital
punishment.

“ In this country, as in England, a soldier who murders a civilian is handed
over for trial to the civil authority, which cannot carry out a capital sonienco
till it is confirmed from Constantinople, and the benefit of a prompt example,
which is so essential in a state of things liko the present, is thereby lost.

**It is not to bo expected that acts of violence will not bo perpetrated
against the refugees; for in addition to the fanatical feelings by which the
Mussulmans may bo animated, many of them must entertain a thirst for
revengo for wives and children murdered, and for property carried off by
those who are about to rotm'n, and it will require a firm hand and a resolute
repression to keep them in chock.’*

A few days after ho had announced the appointment of Wassa
Effendi, Sir H. Elliot was ablo to send a copy of new instructions
that had been addressed to the Turkish Govemors-Generol.

“ These instructions,” Sir H. Elliot adds, “if perfectly adhered to, and en-
forced, appear calculated to remedy much of what is now complained of in the
provinci^ administration ; but till 1 see greater discrimination shown in the
solution of the Govomors-General, and an abandonment of the system of

28 C TUBKBr m BCHOPB.

changing them every two or three months, I shall not expect much benefit
from them.”

A week later (March 10) a report from Mr. Holmes, the Consul
at Bosnia Serai — ^whose knowledge of the country, and good feeling
towards the Porte receive in these papers frequent acknowledg-
ments — ^was forwarded to Lord Derby. It enforces the opinion of
Sir H. Elliot in the following words : —

“With regard to the administrative reforms promised by the Government, there
is one which has not been alluded to, and without which all others will be
impossible, and that is the stability of the Govemors-Genpral in their offices.
It is utterly absurd to imagine that, while those functionaries are changed every
few months, any reforms can bo carried out. No one can be expected oven to
learn the requirements of the Province intrusted to his caro in less than six
months, and unless he is assured of being allowed sufficient time to carry out
his projects ho has no inducement to inaugurate them, and can have no ambition
beyond his own personal interests. It is, therefore, evident that the system
which has so long obtained, is suicidal to all good government, and must cer-
tainly be changed if any amelioration is sincerely intended.”

How soon changes occurred in these very pashalics, we shall seo
presently. Meanwhile, if Lord Palmerston had interfered in
Turkish affairs at all after the manner of the present Government,
and had undertaken, as they in effect did undertake, a heavy
responsibility towards the insurgent population — is it conceivable
that Lord Palmerston would not have adopted some of these
suggestions, and enforced them, from the first and effectively, at
Constantinople ? Mr. Holmes proceeds : —

“ Bosnia and the Herzegovina should, in my opinion, form one Vilayet, under
a Governor-General selected for his courage, energy, probity, and intelligence.
He should be vested with full power to act as ho judges for the best on his own.
responsibility, and should be assured of, at least, six years’ tenure of office,
unless he proved clearly incompetent to fulfil his duties. Ho should also be
allowed to choose his own subordinates.”

Mr. Holmes next refers to another matter, most pertinent to the
subsequent controversy in regard to the Berlin memorandum

“The equality of the Christian and Mussulman population has been pro-
claimed, but this can never be a matter of fact xmtil the former are permitted
the privilege of serving their country as soldiers, or as long as the joermmion of
carrying arms is accorded to tJte one and denied to the other; while these distinctive
marks of inferiority are imposed on tho Christians they will always feel in the
position of a conquered race, and no real feeling of equality can possibly exist.”

Another consular officer, Mr. Freeman, writes (February 18) : —

“ I would here venture to remark that one important point seems to have
been entirely overlooked. There is no question of disarming tho Mussulmans,
Q^/yet, as long as a part of the population are permitted to carry arms and
remainder are denied this privilege, there cannot oven be a semblance of
equality. No doubt it would be a difficult measure to execute at the present
moment, but I believe it could be done by a firm Governor-General, backed

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

28?

by a few battalions of picked troops; and at any rate, if the Mussiilmans
cannot be induced to deliyer up their arms, they might bo prohibited from
carrying them in public. Not eyen the poorest Mussulman peasant now comes
to market without being more or less armed, and the better classes are all
armed to the teeth. This might bo prohibited, and any one transgressing the
order should instantly haye his arms confiscated. The effect of such a measure
yrould bo yery great, and would be an indication that the Goyemment was
in earnest, and would, as eycnts permitted, introduce the other promised
reforms.”

Of tho prospect of the reforms, Mr. Holmes writes (March 30) : —

** Among all classes, howoyer, I find yery great distrust of the power of the
Porte, and eyon of its intention to properly carry out the promised reforms.
Nothing has yet been done to giyc confidence to the Christians, and though
thero arc many intelligent Mussulmans who are conyinced of the propriety and
necessity of a change, there is a large majority who understand neither, and
will offer a stoHd but passiye resistance to all attempts to refoim.”

But an immediate and capital importance belonged to the question
of arms. How, if they returned unaimcd, were the Christian
villagers to be protected against the Mussulman beys and villagers,
who had arms in their hands? Sir A. Buchanan, writing from
Vienna of the inadequacy of the means taken for the safe reception
of the returning refugees — a subject which “ seemed,” he said,

not to have been seriously considered at Constantinople ” — speaks
(March 18) of the military measures that will be necessary to
protect the refugees from the armed and excited Turkish population,
to whom the Government had confided, in a great measure, the
defence of the country since the outbreak of the insurrection.” For
the purpose of escorting the refugees from the frontier, Sir Andrew
Buchanan was informed that a considerable force would be neces-
sary ; while, unless detachments of eight or ten men could be left
at each village, the refugees, many of whom were anxious to return,
would be afraid to do so.” And such detachments were not forthcoming.

Mr. Freeman, however, writing from Bosnia itself, takes a some-
what different view of the same circumstances — a view which points
to the reasonableness of the suggestion that the refugees and
insurgents should be allowed to return armed to their homes, as
proposed in the Berlin note, so long as a strong and impartial
government cannot be established in that pashalik : —

‘‘The local Govemmont protends that many of the refugees from these
provinces are willing and anxious to return, but ore afraid to do so at present,
•as the military au^orities cannot detach troops for their protection, failing
which it is supposed the insurgent bands would not allow them to quietly
settle down. There is no doubt much truth in this suppodtion, but I am sure
that the refugees would be quite as unwilling to put themselves under the
protection of a brutal and jU-disciplined soldiery as to inour the risk of being
•driven from their homes by the insurgents ; and until the insurrection be
finally quelled and all troops withdrawn from the rural districts, there is little
diance of ma^^y of them returning to their country.”

288

TUEKEY IN EUEOPE.

On the 21st of April, Mr. Freeman informed Lord Derby that
in his neighbourhood large numbers of Bashi-Bazouhs had been
enrolled, and that “ the Mussulman population of all the frontier
districts will shortly be anued with breech-loading rifles.’*

Next to the oppression of the Agas and Zaptiehs, that of the so-
called courts of justice had been the most intolerable. On the
3rd of February, Acting-Consul Freeman, writing from Bosnia-
Serai, had to complain that the Government was at that moment
especially unfortunate in its selection of judges. Sir H. Elliot
very properly complained to the Grand Vizier : —

“The Grand A’izier (Feb. 22) excused himself on the plea that all judicial
appointments in the i)rovinces were made by the Minister of Justice, without
roforcnco to him. His hi«:hncss further complained that more than a month
ago the papers respecting the arrangement to be made for the appointment of
Christian raimak.ans in Eulgaiia had been sent to the Minister of Justice, tcho
vp to this time had dmv iiothint/ iu the matter.**

More than a month later, Sir II. Elliot had si ill to complain that
the measures of the Government “ seem calculated still further to
debase the administration of justice ” in the provinces ; and be goes
on to explain how it is that the financial embarrassments “ cannot
fairly be alleged as an excuse.”

And, as to the peasant’s tithes, a capital point in the January
promises, Mr. Acting Consul Freeman writes (May 26) : —

I havo tho honour to inform your lordship that now arrangomonts had
latterly been inado for tho collection of lho‘Aushr,* or titho on agricultural
produce. The system of farming the tithes was entirely abolisliod, and officials
styled * Aashr Mudiri * had been appointed in all tho sandjaks at a salary of
2,500 piastres a month each, with a considerable staff of subordinates, to assess
and collect tho tax. Instructions, however, wore received yesterday by
telegraph from Constantinople to annid this airangomont, and it was ])ublicl 3 *
announced in tho * Idureh Medjliss ’ or Administrative Council, that tho tithes
would ho immediately offered for sale at public auction as heretofore. This
will undoublodl}^ produce a very bad impression in the country.

*‘Tho Commission of Control continues to hold its sittings daily, but its
labours havo as yet homo no Ihiits.

“No doeisiou has y^ct boon como to as regards tho * Bodel-i-askorish,* or
tax in liou of military service, although much time has been spent in discussing
the matter. It was announced that tho tax was only to be paid between the
ages of twenty and forty, hut tho Government persists in demanding tho same
gross amount as hci'otoforc, and it is naturally rather difficult to reconcile such
conflicting, instructions.”

We now pass to tbe heads of tbc administration, the immediate
representatives of tbe Ottoman Forte, in tbe disturbed provinces.
Mr. Holmes writes (March 20) : —

“ The most insurmountable difficulty is the question of money. Instead of
finding 2,000,000 piastres here Wassa Effendi found nothing, as I told your
H&oeillenc^ would probably be the case. Howevqr, 1,000,000 is expected here
in a day or two, and another at a rather inde^te period. But even sup-
posing 2,000,000 to have been on the spot, it is nothing to what is
requ]]^, and* Wassa Effendi .is terrified at the prospect before him.^”

TUBKET IN EUBOFE.

289

Mr. Freeman writes (April 14) : —

« The state of the administration hero continues to be as unsatisfactory as over.
No doubt the position of Wassa Edbndi is an exceedingly difficult one. Boing
subordinate to the Governor-Goneral, he cannot take the initiative in any
matter, and all ho seems to do is to act the part of .Councillor to his Excel-
lency. The local Medjlisses have been re-elected, exactly as in former years,
and without any regard to the interests and wishes of the people in genera?.
The *Bed6l-i-ask6rish,’'or tax in lieu of military service, is being exacted as
heretofore, and payment of the ‘ Aghnam,* or tax on sheep, which should only
be required in the month of June, is being demandod now.”

The Porte had recently made Bosnia and the Herzegovina separate
governments, — a fatal difficulty, wrote Consul Holmes on March 20.
On April 7 he describes Ibrahim Pasha, the Governor-General of
Bosnia, as perfectly indolent and apathetic. Yet in a Turkish pro-
vince the first condition of tolerable administration, even in easy
times, is an able and cncrgollc governor. Of Ali Pasha, the
Governor- General of the Herzegovina, Mr. Holmes writes (April 7),
that he

“Is doing his best to put matters right. I think that on all sides there is
a misapprehension us to tlie attributions and authority of the two Commissioners
with relation to the Governor-General, which, as usual, I suppose, havo not
boon sufficiently clearly defined by the Porto ; and that this will perhaps give
rise to future trouble.”

But the Oommander-in-Chief again w^as independent both of tho
Commissioners and of the Qovcmors-General ; and Moukhtar Pasha,
the Commaiider-in-Chief, it is evident from the papers, detested tho
January policy of conciliation and reform, and thought only of'
pressing forward the war. Three months after the fair promises of
Januurj^ destined still in the following month to be most respectfully
treated by Lord Derby, —

“ Moukhtar Pasha had summoned every available man to join him in tho
second expedition for tho relief of Nichsich. Wassa Effendi complained to me,”
writes Mi*. Monson (April 30), “that this concentration qf all the troops in
the south of tho proviiico was a serious hindrance to him in arranging for the
return of the refugees, whom he could not undertake to protect unless a smidl
military force is placed at his disposal.”

On May 12 (it was on tho 13th the Berlin proposals were handed
to Lord Odo Bussell) a crisis of confusion had been reached in the
Herzegovina. Several hundred &milieB, urged by the Austrian
threat of withdrawing the allowance of food, had actually returned
to their homes, and more were expected. Wassa Effendi demanded
troops to protect them.

” Wassa Effendi,” writes Mr. Holmes, “has this instant informed me that
Moukhtar Paiffia has dedared categori<^y that he wiU not wnd amy iroo^ to
Foporopolie to protect the insurgents who are about to return to that neigh*
bourho^, as he pretends («»e) that he cannot move a single battalion.”

290

TUBEEY IN EUBOf£.

The result was that Wassa EfPendi telegraphed to the Grand.
Yizier his resignation. And Ali Pasha, also a man of honest and firm
character, according to the English bystanders, was ordered to
resign the governorship of the Herzegovina. Mr. Holmes hears that
this was due to the representations of Baron Hodich, the Austrian
Governor of Dalmatia. But it is dear from the papers that Ali had
freely eriticised the proceedings and the veracity of Moukhtar
Pasha. In Bosnia, meanwhile, we quote from Mr. Freeman
(May 12);—

'*Yely Paslm, tho commander of the forces there, has found complete
anarchy reigning in many parts of the country, and tho Bashi-Bazouks
terrorizing the people. At Chazin, near Bihach, especially, the confusion and
disorder were so great that ho placed tho kaimakam (civil governor of a dis-
trict), ** a Boszuan Mussulman, under arrest. More than two hundred armed
Turks, howover, shortly congregated and demanded his release, and Vely
Pasha was forced by threats and intimidation to accede to their demand, and
to withdraw from the place.”

Finally, Mr. Holmes, the special champion of the Porte, d 2 )ropos
of the demands made by the insurgents in April, and pronounced by
him to he unworthy of consideration, thus writes (April 14) : —

** In these demands there is evidence of tho profound distrust with which
every promise of tho Turkish Government is regarded, and I cannot say that
they are without justification. Tho Christians are afraid to 2)ls>co themselves
unarmed in tho power of their old masters, whom they know they have irre-
parably injured. They are informed of tho state of Turkish finances, and arc
naturally anxious to know how they are to bo fed, and given tho moans of
cultivation, when they are aware that there is not money enough to pay the
troops, zaptiehs, and other employes. They dread also tho presence among
them of the himgry and undisciplined soldiers.”

What inferences as to the chances and the mode of effecting the
pacification of the insurgent districts, and of calming the indignant
spirits of the many millions of Slavonic people, who for nine hundred
miles are tho neighbours of the Turkish Empire, — ^are drawn by our
readers from these extracts ?

Lord A. Loftus gives the following account to Lord Derby, of the
conclusions to which, on the 28th of March, Prince Gortchakow was
inclining : —

‘*Tho Prince appeared less sanguine than heretofore of a successful issue to
these negociations, not from any want of energy or goodwill on the part of
those charged with them, but from tho utter prostration of Turkey. The Porte
had no money, no means for re-establishing ^e refugees in their homos, and
so means of affording them sufficient military protection to induce them to
return. There wore, besides, no administrators, civil or military, competent
for the duties which they were called upon to perform. ‘ I con say sincerely,*
said the Prince, * that we wish to maintain the Turkish Empire. It is our
object and interest to do so, but we cannot struggle against destiny; and
although we have used all our diplomatic efforts for the pacification of the
insurgent provinces, we have no means of remedying the internal decay of
the Empire.’ c

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

291

On April 22, when, at the very time efforts were being made to
bring competent representatives of the insurgents into direct com-
munication with the Sultan’s ministers, Moukhtar Pasha was exhaust-
ing the resources of Turkey in the prosecution of the war, — ^Prince
Gortchakow used this language : —

**A11 tliat Russia had douo was to promise that her best efforts should ho
given towards the pacification on the condition that the reforms accepted by the
Porte should bo faithfully carried out. He had therefore asked Cabouli Pasha
if he could cite one single instance in which any of the promises given by the
Porte had been yet carried out. Not a single step, said the I’rince, has yet
been made by the Porte towards the fulfilment of those promises.”

And on the 30th of the same month,

‘‘He observed that Russia and Austria had hitherto successfully exercised
their influence to restrain both Montenegro and Servia from taking part in the
contest ; that, up to the prcsiint moment, all that the powers had received from
the Porte had been a written promise to carry out reforms, not one of which
had as yet received the semblance of execution ; and that the Porte, at the
time when oflbrts were being made by Austria and the other Powers to bring
about an armistice and a pacification, had appealed to arms. If, therefore, tho
efforts of tho European Powers to effect a pacification between the Porte and
the insurgents should prove to bo unavailing, although ho will do nothing
to incito Servia and Montenegro, ho can no longer restrain them from action.

** There can be no doubt, said his lughness, that in such on event the insur-
rection would assume mv.ch larger projmrtions, and a flame would be kindled
in Rulgoria, Epirus, Thessaly, and Albania, which the Porte, with its weakened
resources, would bo unable to extinguish ; and the Christian Powers of Europe,
awakened by public opinion to tho call of humanity, will have to interpose to
arrest tho effusion of blood.”

III.

By Easter that chapter of events, which had begun with the well-
intended, but, it must be said, the inadequate and, as regards the
insurgents, delusive, plan of pacification proposed by Count Andrassy,
was about to close. If within a few weeks, possibly even days, the
insurrection could not 1|e arrested, all observers saw it must reach
far wider limits. And with the failure of the plan of pacification by
fair promises, was sure to fall also the ministry of Mahmoud ; and
the advent was near of a more vigorous military administration.

“Should the insurrection bo continued,” wrote Sir Andrew Buchanan from
Vienna on the 9th of April, “ even in the doubtful case of Servia and Monte-
negro remaining neutral, the policy of tho present Grand Vizier will have
signally failed, and it may bo feared that tho Turkish Goveriiment will come to
consider that all the resources of the country, without any regard to foreign
creditors, ^ould be devoted to the maintononce of Mussulman supremacy in
the European Provinces of the Empire, as the only means of prolonging its
existence.”

Servia and Montenegro did not remain neutral. And all tho
resources of the country were speedily to be devoted, not only with-
out regard to foreign creditors, but by other methods not always
scrupulous or .merciful, to the purpose contemplated by Sir A.
Buchanan.

TOL. XX. N.s.

X

292

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

In tie interval, could anything be done ? To this question the
Chancellors of Austria and Eussia addressed themselves without
delay. Both had strong reasons to dread the continuance, much
more the extension, of the insurrection. And both had some, and
one the strongest, reasons for fearing the results on public opinion
in their respective countries of a pacification efiected without some
security for the safety of the persons, and for the tolerable govern-
ment in future, of the Christian population.

- In a conference with Baron Eodich and General Jovanovich
(April 7), in which the insurgent chiefs were again urged on the
part of the great Powers to accejit the proposals of the Porte and
lay down their arms, the latter announced the conditions which they
deemed essential. They asked : —

“ I. That to the Christians shall he given at least a third of the lands as their
property; land which the Turks took and usur])od from the Chi'istians, and
without which third tho latter will not be able to live.

“IL That Turkey withdraws the troops in tho Herzegovina, and shall only
maintain garrisons which shall bo recognized as iioccRsary in tho following
places ; Mostar, Stolatz, Trebigne, Nichsich, I'loolje, and Toccio.

“ III. That Turkey cause to be rebuilt tho houses and churches that have l)ocn
burned, provide for the Christians food for at least a year, and agricultural
implements, and exempt them from taxation for throe years from the date of
their return. ^

** IV. That the Christians shall not lay down their arms until the Mussulmans
shall have been disarmed, and until tho refonns are in process of execution.

y. The Christians having retiuncd, their leaders shall come to an understand-
ing with the Government as to the execution of the reforms. Tho siiid leaders
shall compose an assembly with tlio functioiiaiios of the Government for the
application and tho regulation of tho said reforms, which latter must be
extended to the whole of Bosnia and tho Herzegovina.

** VI. As the insurgents cannot trust to tho simple promises of tho Porte, which
he has never been known to keep, and as also the Porto will with difficulty
support her own troops, tho insurgents, tearing that tho money given by the
Ports for tho Christians may bo lost in the hands of the Turkish omploygs, who
would distribute nothing, and would let the Christians starvo^ and as tho
insurgents know that they would got no help from tho Porto, even if tho powers
fdiould protest ; on these grounds wo demand that tho money shall be^paid into
tho hands of tho treasurer of an Eui’opean Commission, that this Commission
shall receive all the funds for tho reconstruction by itself of tho houses and
churches, and for tho distribution of provisions to tho Christian families, erect-
ing for that purpose central storehouses in convenient places.

“ Pinallj^ we demand that in the before-mentioned garrisons occupied by the
Turks, tho Governments of Austria and Pussia shall establish agents, who
shall see that tho reforms arc executed as we desire.”

At the moment these counter-proposals were absolutely rejected
by the two Powers ; while the British Ambassador and tho
British Goveniment thought them unworthy of a moment’s remark.
Count Andrassy — ^never a friend of the Slavs — ^was said to have
declared against the further concession of a hair’s breadth.” On
the other hand, the Italian Consular Commissioner regarded the first
condition as extremely pertinent and suggestive, h& having invari-
ably maintained that the agrarian grievance lay at the root of the

TURKEY IK EUROPE.

293

Bosnian question. The demand for a third of the lands/’ he urged,

was not to be considered a communistic aspiration, but as a clumsily
expressed desire for the revocation of the agrarian regulations of 1851
and 18C2, which abolished the ancient feudal privileges of the tillers
of the soil,” and made them completely dependent on the Agas.

Prince Gortchakow, too, though acquiescing in the public action
desired by Count Andrassy, from the first maintained that —

** Tho fact of the countor-proposals being made was a proof that the insur-
gents, undor certain conditions, wero ready to lay down their arms.

‘*lle fuithor observed that there was nothing in the countor-proposals of
the insurgent chiefs which was in opposition to the spirit of Count Andrassy’s
proposals.

** They neither asked to bo freed from the direct rule of the Sultan, nor did
their counter-proposals aim at any territorial dismemberment of the Empire.
Tho maintenance of the six garrisons in tho Herzegovina and Bosnia was a
l^roof that they projected no dismemberment of tho Empire. Their object
alone was to obtain some guarantee for the execution of tho proposals accepted
by the Porto.”

Lord Augustus Loftus, reporting the conversation, added : —

** Prom what Prince Gortchakow said, I am led to believe that ho has taken
stops to induce Count Andrassy to * modify his opinions, with a view to a
renewal of the nogociatioiis with tho insurgent chiefs. At the same time 1
could perceive, from tho language of the Chancellor, that ho was most anxious
to maintain a perfect understanding and co-operation with Austria, and to
prevent anything which could lead to a divergence of opinion between the two
Cabinets in regard to Eastern affairs.”

The result of the concert thus described by the British Ambassa-
dor is to be found in the now famous Berlin Memorandum,
handed to Lord Odo Bussell on the 13th of May. The memorandum
proposed no new radical changes, such as that demanded by the
insurgents relating to the agrarian question. To this extent tho
Austro-Hungarian Chancellor remained unconvinced, and prevailed.
But tho two Cliancellors and Prince Bismarck agreed to recommend
to the other Powers that a suspension of arms for two months should
be exacted from the Porte ; and also further stipulations, the purpose
of which (whether well or ill conceived) was to give some degree
of confidence to the insurgents and refugees that they might
return without danger to their lives ; and at the same time some
assurance to the Christians, in other Slavonic countries as well as
in the insurgent provinces, that effect would at last be given to the
promises of reform. It is evident that the Austro-Hungarian
Chancellor had been sincerely convinced of the prudence of these
modifications of his original opinion in regard to the demands of the
insurgents.

”The insurgents,” be said, addressing the Budget Committee of the Austrian
Delegation (]^y 20), *‘had demanded things absolutely inadmissible, things
alroady granted, and things whieh aimed at practical guarantees fbr the aocom-
plishment of the reforms. Tho first were unconditionally i^'eoted, but the
practical guarantees must be sought for.”

X 2

294

TUROY m EUROPE.

The distinction was well founded, and justified by the demand®
alone recommended to be made.

To the success of the proposals, of which we have thus traced
the origin and tho spirit, the support of the British Cabinet, as the
principal adviser, most trusted friend, and diplomatic champion of the
Porte, was essential. It was withheld.

But is it not true that the Parliamentary papers, full as they
are of the evidence of persons on the whole most unfavourable to the
insurgents, demonstrate that the latter could not prudently return
to their homes without guarantees ; that it was necessary, in the
words of the Berlin Memorandum, to ‘‘ inspire them with confidence
in the vigilant solicitude of Europe ; ” and that the “ gravity of the
situation,” to use Prince Gortchakow's words to the British Ambassa-
dor (April 3), “required that the European powers should hold
the most energetic language to the Porte, with a view to the
adoption of such concessions as will reasonably satisfy the insurgents^
and thereby give peace to her disaffected subjects ? ” It cannot be
said that the demands of the Berlin Memorandum, if they had been
made to and accepted by the Porte, would have certainly brought
about a pacification. But it can bo said without hesitation that
nothing short of them offered a chance of that result.

Lord Derby’s rejection of the Berlin plan was unqualified. As an
alternative he was invited to accept it as a basis for consideration.
He was asked to suggest alterations, while keeping the same end in
view. From France, from Italy, from Austria, from Germany, from
Ilussia, successively came the most urgent instances, even entreaties
to England to join in the efforts proposed to be made for the restora-
tion of peace. “ The several articles of the Memorandum,” said
Prince Bismarck, (May 20), “ were open to discussion, and might be
modified according to circumstances ; and he, for one, would
willingly entertain any improvement her Majesty’s Government
might have to propose.” But Lord Derby was inexorable. “ I have
no plan to propose,” he said to Count Beust, when, on the parbof his
Government, the Austrian Ambassador had made a similar request
two days earlier. And a week had not elapsed before the British
Ambassador at Constantinople was not, indeed, in any sense urging
tho Porte on the responsibility of England to reject the note which
it was then still thought would be presented ; but was at least in
consultation with Baschld Pasha, as to the objections which might
properly be made to its anticipated contents.

In Lord Derby’s reply to the Berlin Memorandum a couple of almost
contemptuous lines are thought sufficient to refute two of the five
propositions of the Memorandum : — ^the proposal that the insurgents
and refugees should be allowed to return in arms ; and the proposal
that the Ihirkish troops in these provinces should be concentrated in
specified fortresses and garrison-towns. Would any one, who had

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

295

read the correspondence of the British Ambassador and Consuls, have
believed the substance or the manner of this reply to those proposals
to be possible ?

Secondly, the fifth point of the memorandum had provided That
the Consuls or delegates of the Powers should keep watch over the
application of the reforms in general, and over the steps relative to
the repatriation in particular.’’ To this Lord Derby, with the same
curtness as before,^ and even more of the air of a superior person,”
replies, The consular supervision would reduce the authority of the
Sultan to nullity, and without force to support it supervision would
be impossible.”

Now, certainly, it is not too much to say that every twentieth page
of the five hundred contained in the Blue Books No. 2 and No. 3
gives an instance in which acts of neglect, incompetence, or
cruelty on the part of Ottoman ministers or officials, were checked
or prevented, or were not unhopef ully attempted to be checked or
prevented, by the remonstrance of a liritish representative. The
Ottoman Government is, in fact, not only afraid of the Great Powers
and anxious to stand well with them, or with those of them it deems
the strongest and, at the same time, the most friendly ; it has good
intentions of a sort, though they are perpetually frustrated by the
extreme badness of the immense majority of its agents. And it is
one of the most notable characteristics of the Porte that some of its
best work has been done when the circumstances have justified the
warning voice of a British representative. No doubt it is an anomaly
for tlie government of a great Empire ever to move in leading
strings ; but the existence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe at all
is an anomalJ^ Had, then, the Northern Powers made a proposition
so unworthy of consideration, when they urged that till the security of
life and property in the disturbed provinces should have been estab-
lished, and till cficct should have been given to the promises of
reform, this right of criticism and report should by express
stipulation be given to named representatives of the great Powers
collectively? No doubt this implied the possible employment of
force, in the event of the failure of the Porte to make effectual
reforms. But the Porte’s acceptance of the Andrassy Note had
already given the Great Powers the right to employ force in that
event, and this proposal of the Memorandum did no more thto
provide machinery for giving effect to the principles of the Note.

(1) Anothor of tho points of the Memorandum provided that the Porte should give the
Consular Commission the means of feeding the refugees on thoir return, tUl they had
the means of feeding themselves, t.s., till the next harvest. These refugees are now
being fed by tho Austrian Government, and would dio if left to themselves on their
return home. IJut tho English Secretary of State observes : •* It would be little better
than a system of indiscriminate almsgiving. It would probably be beyond the power
of the Porte (a Stateable to pay for war) ‘‘to adopt, and would prove ntterly de-
moralising to any country.” There is a notable affinity between the doctrinaire style
of this dispatch and the ignoble policy of which it was the outcome.

296

TUBKET IN EVBOFE.

But tlie ** breacli in the European concert, of which the dispatch
of May 19 was the expression, was, in fact, a necessary result of
the radical difference of aim which, from the beginning, separated
the policy of Mr. DisraeFs cabinet from that of Eussia, and of the
Powers which, on the whole, have cordially sanctioned and supported
her view of the troubles in South-eastern Europe. Consistently from
the beginning, with the single exception of what they have perhaps
since regretted, their adhesion to the Andrassy note, the British
cabinet has refused to enter info engagements, or to become in any
way responsible for measures, for the improvement of the system of
the Turkish government, or for the permanent amelioration of the
condition of its subjects. Eussia and Austria regarded the declara-
tion of reforms by the Porte, which followed the presentation of
tho Andrassy Note, as different in kind from all previous declarations,
because it was due to the " initiative of the Great Powers,” and
because it ** gave them a right to intervene ” in the event of a clear
failure to give effect to the reforms. The English Government could
not be ignorant that this was both the effect and the intention of the
Andrassy Note ; but it passed, as it were, gently and silently over
the novel and dangerous concession; and in Lord Derby’s dis-
patches of January 25, notifying his adhesion to the Andrassy
Note, there is a carefully apologetic and deferential tone towards
the Porto, perfectly consistent with his subsequent refusal even to
eonsider the question of asking for guarantees, when, five months
later, the insurrection was spreading, and the Porte had not made
even a beginning of giving either effect to the reforms or security to
the refugees willing to return.

The British view may be thus expressed: “We cannot agree to
any interference with the free exercise by the Porte of its sovereignty.
We will not in any way be parties to a policy seeking to control its
administration in the supposed interests of its subjects — first, because
we do not wish to impair tho sovereignty of the Porto ;.^condly,
because we do not believe that foreign governments can effectually
superintend even in the most general manner the administration of
another government. What we do desire is that the Turks should
put down the insurrection, and, meanwhile, that the neighbouring
governments should prevent their predatory or sympathising subjects
from giving it help. As for tho Ohristian or ether misgoverned
subjects of Turkey, wo are quite willing, if we can see our way,
to give tho Porte advice, especially when tho insurrection is put
down ; but as for any effect that may be given to our advice, or to
their own better considered plans of reform, we must trust, and ask
the insurgents to trust, in the self-interest of tho Porte. If, after
the lesson of this insurrection, the Porte does not govern better it
will ultimately come to ruin. That is the only refuge, painful and
slowly reached as it may be, to which, if the Porte cannot reform

TUEKEY IN EUROPE. 297

hiB own goremment, wo can invite iis oppressed subjects to look for
ultimate deliTerance.”

The Russians^ on the other hand, still insisted on the status quo
am^lior^.” Their argument was to this eflfcct: — “It is perfectly
true that to control the administration, even in the most general
way, and for a limited time, of a Foreign Power is not a very
hopeful task. But the objections both to the autonomy and to
the annexation to any neighbouring state, and to the temporary
occupation by a Foreign l^owcr, of the insurgent provinces, are
considered by all of us and admitted by Great Britain, to be at
present at least insuperable. It may have been impolitic or
criminal to begin the insurrection at the particular time at which it
was begun. But wc cannot use Russian influence, nor can Austria
restrain her Slavonic subjects, so as to assist in putting down the
insuiTGction, until there is some hope of good government. This is
partly because an opposite policy would make the Emperor's govern-
ment detested, and wc cannot say unjustly detested, by all good people
in Russia. But it is chiefly because the establishment of a tolerable
gevornment is the only means whereby another insurrection, and all
thj accompanying trouble and immense peril to Europe, can be
avndcd a few years after this has been put down. More than this,
it B a much more difficult thing than you seem to imagine to put
dovn Slav committees, and arrest the movements of Slav enthusiasts.
If vc cannot to some extent satisfy these people, if we cannot inspire
the insurgents and their friends in the Austrian provinces and else-
wbre with confidence that a real change will be effected, the
dnsirrcction will go on and spread, whether we like it or not. The
insirrection will go on and spread with infinite cruelty and devastation
of povinces, till either there are great Turkish successes, requiring
a nuch more difficult kind of intervention than might now be
sufleient ; or great Turkish disasters bringing with them a dis-
meBberment of the Empire, and the risk of a continental war.”

h the presence of such alternative dangers, was the enforcement
andsupervision of reforms to be effected within the limited territory
of he insurgent provinces, a task so entirely beyond the reach of
thet^hole of the Great Powers of Europe, united (but for England)
in sii almost unparalleled unity of purpose P

lie opportunity had come and was missed. The certainty that
it wfuld meet a refusal from the Porte (see dispatch from Raschid
Pasja, May 21, and from Sir H. Elliot, May 27), was undoubtedly
the^eal reason why the note was never presented.

It. Disraeli boasted that the concert of the great Powers, thus
brojen, bad been restored in a concert of inaction, — in an agreement
to mit for the results of war. But in their anticipations of the
resijts of war the Gfovemments were far from an agreement. Prince
Gojehakow looked forward to “the aggravation of all previous

m

TURKEY IK EUROPE.

difficulties by a fanatical war of extermination (June 21) ; while
Lord Derby considered tbat^ if either party should obtain a decided
advantage over the other, the Powers would be in a position to
meditate usefully and effectually/^ Was this novel opinion as to the
time most appropriate for mediation, prompted by a character given
to excuses for inaction ; or was there, and is there, a faint chance that,
contrary to experience and all the appearances of the hour, the Otto-
man Turk, liis warrior’s pride once satiated, will recognise his admini-
strative incapacity, and accept practical limitations to his dominion P
That warrior’s pride liad been so effectively roused by the prolonged
irritation of a war waged by peasants and volunteers, and so encouraged
by the sympathy of England and the consequent inaction of the
civilised l*owcrs, that even on May 27 a vast military effort was
ready ; and, yet earlier, orders had been given to put arms foi the
destruction of the Sultan’s enemies into the hands of the most bbod-
thirst}' bf the Mahommedan races. And a few weeks later, Servia
and Montenegro, not realising the magnitude of the forces raised
to meet them, had declared war.

IV.

Public feeling has been deeply moved by the events which have
been disclosed during the last month. If an effort may be madeto
interpret the i)ublic wishes, they are that means may be found :or
l^reveiiling the recurrence of calamities which, while horrible in
themselves, retard in Ihe most serious manner the prosperity aid
the civilisation of South-Eastern Europe, The English people icl
that a government which, having such subjects as the Circasshns
and Bashi-Dazouks, puts arms in their hands, and bids them masss^re
thousands of unarmed citizens, or which, having put the arms hto
their hands, cannot restrain them, must be a very barbarous or
a very w'^eak government. They see that if any of the murderers ire
punished, if the course of murder is stopped so soon as may i iw
have been the case, it is only because by accident foreigners v >re
looking on ; and they infer that if things so horribly bad are c no
in w'ar, things very bud must be done in the quiet times of pej ;
that if such things are done by the orders, and subsequently vi: ii-
cated by the authority, of a Grand Vizier of the “ highest qual ies
and the purest patriotism,”^ and in an arena on which the eyi i of

(1) See (1) Sir II. Elliot to Lord Derby, June 19, 1876 : —

“ Your lordship has received Mr. Consul lieade’s report of the cruelties &o. ;

“ I have again spoken very seriously to the Grand Vizier on the subject &c ;

**Mehcniet Kuchdi Tashii assured me . . . that ‘tbo* emergency had bei l so

great os .to render it indispensable at once to stamp the movement out by any n lans
that were available * (the movement was quite trifling, the Bulgarians being gene illy
a well-affected population) ; * and under tho circumstances the Govomment hi no
choice ”

and (2) tho Same to the Same, May 31, 1876, from which it appears that Mob net
Kuchdi Pasha’s character is singularly high among Turkish statesmen?

TUEKEY IN EUROPE.

299

Europe have long been known to bo fixed, intolerable things must
be done every day in little-known provinces by obscure governors,
and by petty officials in many remote districts.

Thus it has come to pass that public opinion is far more inclined
to attend to Turkish afiairs than it was two months ago. It listens
to the evidence which proves that the Bosnians and Herzegovinians
revolted against oppression and maladministration which had broken
the spirits of nearly all they had not turned into brigands. It does
not suppose that all the provinces in the immense Ottoman Empire
suffer equally or in the same way ; it does not deny that the Turks at
Constantinople may be tolerant, wise, and courteous gentlemen ; it
wishes to exaggerate nothing against old allies of England ; but it is
still satisfied that the government of an empire so vast lays on them
a task to which they arc altogether unequal ; and it feels that the
only chance of the long continuance of Turkish rule anywhere lies in
limiting its dominion, and enabling it to concentrate on a smaller
territory whatever administrative ability it possesses.

What prospect is there of these ideas being raised from the vague
region of hopes into that of practical politics ? And, first, what
are in fact the smallest changes that would be sufficient to satisfy
the double aim of arresting the misgovemment and degradation of
races in whose prosperity and strength all Europe has an interest,
and of limiting the responsibilities of Turkey to something like the
measure of its administrative capacity? Would any change be ade-
quate that would do less than withdraw from the direct government
of Coiistuntinoplo Bosnia and the Herzegovina, and also Bulgaria ?

The claims of Bosnia and the Herzegovina rest on their excep-
tional misery and misgovemment, and on the fact that the prevailing
disorder and distress are rooted in an agrarian confusion, and in a
complication of social and religious difficulties, the solution of which
is not only altogether beyond the reach of Turkish capacity, but
would try the metal of the best English or Indian administrators.
If, indeed, the interests of the population arc really to be considered,
the choice lies between but two alternatives ; the immediate annexa-
tion of the provinces partly to Montenegro, but principally to the
strong and civilised government of Austria-Hungary, and their
temporary occupation by a sufficient P^uropean force until the^
agrarian difficulties, the difficulties as to the constitution of the local
armed force, and the other difficulties (not so considerable) arising
out of the mutual relations of the three religions « have been solved,
and order and confidence created by strong and competent hands.^

(1) Count Andrassy*s opinion, that tho mixed Chiistian and Mahommedftn population
of Bosnia is in itself inconsistent with the autonomy of the provinoe, is suggested by his
wishes. Put on a footing of justice the relations of the peasantry to the soil, and such
a population inll live as peacoably as a similar population in Bussian (p. 166, aiepfs), and
as Hindoos and^Mussulmans in Indian, villages.

300

TURKEY m EUROPE.

Then the provinces might possibly be ripe for such a relation of
vassal and tributary autonomy to the Forte^ as seems to be con-
templated by Prince Gortchakow.

The claims of the Bulgarian nation are diSeront. Upon it^
on account of its robust and laborious character, the strong
national sentiments that animate it, and the comparatively slight
intermixture with it of any Mahommedan population, have long
rested a large part of the hopes of prosperity for South-Eastern
Europe. If the war could have boon kept within its original limits,
or-if the Turks could have defeated the Servians without massacres
in Bulgaria, the relations of the people to the Porte might long have
remained unchanged. But two months have wrought a vast change.
They have brought the Bulgarians and the Turks into such
relations with each other, that the former relations of goodwill, or
at least mutual tolerance, can hardly bo revived ; and Europe, moved
by the danger to herself of disorder and weakness in the East, is
alarmed at the prospect of a population, on which so much depends,
continuing under the direct rule of the Porte, with the risks of
degradation that rule involves.

Not for a moment must the magnitude of the change proposed be
underrated. The question is one of the gravest that over made demands
on the self-restraint, and the courage of Europe. It is more difficult in
some respects than that which in 1830-1 owed its happy solution to the
initiative of Great Britain. The changes would be prompted, indeed,
first of all by regard for the interest of the Porte ; by the absolute
necessity that exists to lessen its responsibilities, if it is to continue to
live. But the Turks, victorious, proud, not given to self-criticism,
cannot be expected to regard their situation in this light. Even if pre-
sented to them in the happiest and most delicate terms by their firmest
ally, such proposals would be startling. When the military efibrts
of Turkey seemed baffled on every hand, and when the question was
only of demanding guarantees for the execution of reforms in Bosnia
and the Herzegovina, the British Government (June 14) doubted
“the possibility of effective interposition, unless the powers wero
prepared {which her Majesty^ s Government were not) to use compul-
sion.” Now, when the Porte has developed great military resources
and considerable military ability, and Servia lies open before its
victorious armies, far larger and deeper questions cannot be raised
and settled, unless by the concerted action of all the Great Powers,
prepared even to use compulsion, should compulsion be necessary to
support their demands.

What’ are the grounds for thinking the great Powers are now
equal to such a task P Some such grounds there seem to be in the
prevailing and recognised necessity for peace among the groat
Powers themselves; in the character of the sovereigns and ministers ;
n the desire (characteristic of our time, and which has been greatly

TUHKET IN EUEOPE,

301

stimulated by tbe success of the Italian experiment to obtain, as it
were, firom accomplished facts and contented nations a security for
‘*a system of peace;” and, lastly, in the language, published in
these papers, of tho leading statesmen.

^^The main task of Austrian Hungary,” said Count Andrassy
(May 24) to the Hungarian Delegation, is the bringing about of
such a state of affairs that the periodical recurrence of such hungers
as now exist shall be prevented.” And on the 21st of Juno Prince
Gortchakow declared, ‘‘ The Emperor of Hussia is persuaded that it
is both possible and desirable that tho several Governments should
come to an agreement as to the means of arriving at a satisfactory
solution of the present complications.”

And, with regard to means, speaking of tho limited problem then
(May 9) alone before the Powers, Prince Gortchakow, in common
with all the Powers who supported the Berlin memorandum, con-
templated, of course, the of military intervention ; — but “ on

condition that it bore an European character, and was carried out
under European supervision.”

Of the “ real intentions ” of any Power, it may be an extremity
of irrelevance and of credulity to quote the professions of diplo-
matists. Lord Augustus Lof tus, however, writes ^ : —

** I feol persuaded that tho predominant wish of tho Emperor Alexander is to
maintain peace, and that his policy in I’egard to Eastern affairs is perfectly
disinterested. ... I am also convinced that Princo Gortschakoff aspires
to no exclusive advantage for Eussia in tho course ho is pursuing.*’

(1) One of the many happy results of Italian freedom and unity is that Italian
questions aro no longer a source of mutual suspicion and rocrimination, not to speak of
war, between two of the greatest European powers. Not the least of tho advantages
that maybe expected to flow from the concert of England and liussia in obtaining for
tlie most advancod of tho South Slavonic nations securities for the free development of
their national character, is the arrest of the flow of angry words and unreasonable sus-
picions which now disgraces a portion of the press, and occasionally one or two
diplomatists, of the two countries. It ought to be now unnecessary to say that there is
not a particle of evidence for connecting llassia with the rising in the Herzegovina. It
is only after many months that private Kussian committees gave any help. And to those
suspicious persons who say, ** Of course there is' no ovidenoe in the Blue Books, but, all
the same, Kussia * did it,’ ” we can only reply by saying that for nearer than Bussia
are at least five or six mainly Slavonic communities, most of them with little love for
Bussia, which notoriously rondored enough assistance to explain the ability of the
natives to continue the insurrection, and their hopes of success. We read of ** Italians”
(p. 10), of seven hundred Austrian Croats (p. 18), of four hundred or five hundred old
Grenzers (Slavonians of the military frontier), of *' a few Servians,” of the Oznladina
of Servia as more active than is liked by the native Bosnians, of Kara George the
younger and his Serbs, of Dalmatians, of Austrian subjects again and again, and of
Montenegro and the Montenegrins constantly. Is not this enough, v^ithout dragging
in tlxe name of Russia ; though of courso in such a soene Russiau subjects cannot long
have been wholly unroproaented P

Tho truth is that only “ gambling ” politicians could, in the present ^condition of
Europe and the East, expect to gain for Bussia torritorial, or any exclusive, advantages
within the Turkish dominions. And the p^sent rulers of Russia are not ganibUng ’’
politicians, 'though no one can say what will ho tho character of their suceessors.

(2) No. 409. Juno 6.

802 TURKEY IN EUROPE.

Aitd as to public opinion in Bussia : —

** While there is undoubtedly a strong feeling of sympathy on the part of
the Russian nation for the Christian population in Turkey, there is among the
higher and enlightened classes an equally ardent desire for the maintenance of
peace ; and there is, moreoyor, a sti*ong conviction that any entanglement of
Bussia in an European war, for which she is wholly unprepared, would be the
greatest calamity that could befall the Empire.**

If we turn from the professions of diplomatists to the actual con-
dition of Europe, there is not less ground for hope that a permanent
settlement and not mutual quarrels will be the result, if the Eastern
question, at least within the limits indicated, is now taken into con-
sideration by the Great Powers with that purpose in view. There
is strong evidence that it is not only the clear interest, but the fixed
resolution of each of the Great Powers to remain at peace with the
others : England, Italy, and Germany, because they are satisfied with
existing arrangements as regards themselves ; Austria-Hungary,
because she is convinced that no possible change*of territorial limits
could help her. France, inasmuch as she is far from satisfied with her
present frontier, and Bussia, by reason of the aggressive designs
vaguely attributed to her, are regarded as possible disturbers of Euro-
pean peace in the future. But, at present neither is armed. The griefs
of Franco are not in the East, where the prudent statesman, who
for several years has now had charge of the Foreign Office, desires
only a permanent settlement of chronic difficulties. Did Bussia, as
we entirely disbelieve, look on the South Slavonic nations as raw
material for the manufacture of Bussian subjects, she would still, in
the present condition of her armaments, shrink from a w'ar which,
begun with Austria, might end by bringing her into collision with
the still giant power of Germany. A further security for peace lies in
the feet that, the only two Powers to which conflicting wishes with
regard to the Turkish provinces can be attributed, are precisely the
two Powers in whose case war would aggravate domestic dangers,^
already in the highest degree alarming.

Nor is there real cause for misgiving in the attitude of
Austria-Hungary. Count Andrassy, it is true, has formally
acquainted Bussia, Germany, and England, with the objections of
his Government to the grant of autonomy to any Slavonic people.
This objection, how’ever, is a part of Hungarian rather than of
Austrian policy. It is not shared by Europe, as, on the part of
England, Lord Derby, saving always the reference to Constantinople,
at once plainly stated. And, if it shall be recognised as inconsistent
with the general interest of Europe, Austria is not in a position to
disregard that interest. In fact. Count Andrassy, warned of this,
and desiring before everything a pacific and permanent settlement of
the Bosnian question, is already preparing to take a new position ;
and, if in a short time he is urged either to occupy or to annex Bosnia

TUBEET IK EUBOPE.

303

and the greater part of the Herzegovina^ he will probably' not be
found to need so much pressure as would once have been necessary.

From these considerations, the readiness of the other Great Powers
to co-operatc with England may: be inferred ; but were it otherwise,
it would still be the duty of England even alone to take such
an initiative as a sagacious estimate of her just influence and of
her power at Constantinople might justify. The limits of her in-
fluence must largely depend on the charaeter of her representative,
and of the policy he is directed to follow. But in firm and resolute
hands her influence is the immense influence of an ally who wields
vast strength at sea, who has never failed Turkey in an emer-
gency, and to whom within the limits of Turkey no selfish purpose
can be imputed. And, if this influence could bo used for obtaining
from the Porte, quietly and without struggle — for the Bulgarians,
well considered franchises, guaranteeing the free development of
national life ; and for Bosnia, reforms, going to the root of agrarian
and sectarian disorders — immense would bo the service rendered to
the Porte,® immense to Europe, and not least to Russia. Russia
in the sense of the enlightened classes in that country, “ Russia in
the sense of its present Government, knows well that the South
Slavonic communities are alien ^ from the Russians, and that facts

(1) Compare dispatches in P. P. Turkey iii., Nos. 481, 365, and 527*

(2) A leading journal of 'Westem Europe thus writes (July 29) as to Turkey : —
“ EUe a tout k perdre h s'etendre, tout a gagnor A sc reduire. Depuis longtemps les
provincos cloign^es du gouvcmcmcnt central ont echappe li son contr61e, ot Tindd-
pendance administrative qui leur serait donnee, avec lo maintien de la suzerainetd du
Sultan, ne ferait que fortifier la situation do la Turquie proprement dite.” Of the then
policy of Mr. Disraeli, the same journal adds : ** Le grand danger de cette trop sage
politique, e’est do li^Ter toutes Ics races Ghrdtienncs de T Orient d rinfluonce exdusiye
de la Bussie.”

(3) Comparatively indifferent to all they have in common, and each tenacious of
whatever distinguishes it in manners, character, tradition, language, and religion, even
the nearest neighbours among the South Slavonic nations regard each other with
jealousy, and deprecate union. A hundred years hence, intercommunication and culture
may have united thorn, as the various German communities have become united ; and
a r^ or supposed necessity of defence against Eussia, for instance, or Germany, may
very soon suggest some form of confederation. But the most cherished wish of every
Bulgarian is that his country should remain Bulgaria, and on no account be united
with Servia. Consul-General White (one of the ablest of British consular officers)
informs us that what more than anything else contributed to the determination of
Servia to make war on Turkey, was the fear that her neighbours and rivals, the Croats,
by their strenuous support of the insurrection, were winning the lead'etdiip of the
people of the Slavonic ** No Man’s Land,” Bosnia. Even in Bosnia itself a national
feeling does survive, notwithstanding extreme misery and the bitterest animosities of
class and creed ; and, early in the insurrection, agents of the Servian Omladina were
beaten and sent home, because they were supposed to have ** foreign,” and not Bosnian
or Herzegovinian interests at heart. But in the hour of real Bosnian distress, as now
in the hour of Servian distress, all help becomes welcome ; and ,if Bnsnan help is
welcomed with tears of gratitude in Servia, it is as in every Polidi insunection, French
help was welcome. And an inference cannot thence be drawn that the Sernan people
any more than the Bulgarians would endure incorporation with remote, foreign, and
autocratic Busids,. or would open for Bussia a road to Constantinople.

304

TURKEY m EUROPE.

contradict the theory of Panslavism. But there is another Bussia,
the Busda of a large part of the press and of the army, for which
Panslavism is patriotism. This llussia, if there came a Ozar
sharing its dreams, might well fill Eastern Europe with war.
And nothing short of such dististrous contact with the realities of
South Slavonic feeling can ever give a lasting cheek to the hopes
and intrigues of this Bussiti,’* unless it bo the actual existence of
institutions giving contentment to the South Slavonian peoples, and a
free course to their national genius.

V.

We cannot conclude this notice of the papers presented to Parlia-
ment without some remarks on the part they represent to have been
taken by the present head of the English Foreign Ofiicc. From the
beginning to the end of the eventful year to which they refer, but
one idea seems to occupy the mind of the Minister ; that Bussia and
Austria could and should compel their subjects and the two princi-
palities to withhold all assistance from the insurgents. For hundreds
of pages this idea is repeated with wearisome iteration by Lord
Derby and his agents in South-Eastern Europe. But at the end of,
at the most, five months, it had become apparent that the two
governments were cither unable or unwilling to do what was desired.
As England had no means of compelling them to do as she wished,
the fact of their want of will or want of power was one of capital
importance, requiring a new view to be taken of the situation, and a
new departure. But on and on to the end of the papers the changes
are rung on this useless theme : Lord Derby, meanwhile, refusing,
till the impossible should have been accomplished, to consider any
means for gudng assurance of reform, or any new plan of pacification.
What is to bo thought of a minister’s judgment, who spoke quite
hopefully of the prospect of war to the bitter end between the Porto
and its subjects, as a process likely to terminate in a reasonable com-
promise: who told the Russian Ambassador that 'Mhe sympathy
notoriously felt in Bussia for the insurgent population of Turkey was
in itself enough to explain the suspicion and mistrust towards Bussia
of the English press, and of English speakers ; ” who considered the
interests of England in the East would be furthered by the publica-
tion of this remark ; and who allowed the English Ambassador at
Constantinople to report to him, without reproof, as if it were both
true and relevant, a Coiistantinopolitan rumour, that Bussia was at
the bottom of the risings in Bulgaria.”

Nor even has the limited part Lord Derby assigned to himself
been well performed. England was the trusted, as well as the
|>owerful, friend of the Ottoman Empire. At all times English
advice, when it points to definite acts and is properly urged, has with
the Forte a controlling influence. In circumstances of perplexity

TURKET IN EUROPE.

305

and weakncsSi such as those of the early months of the present year,
disregard of a practicable suggestion on the part of England would
have been out of the question. Several such suggestions were indi-
cated by the Consuls all were unnoticed by the Secretary of State.
Yet of one of these, the suggestion that the Porte should appoint
its ablest and strongest administrator as Governor-General of the two
provinces, for the express purpose of carrying into effect the Andrassy
reforms ; and should give him for a fixed term unqualified control
over the Commander-in-Chief as well as over all the officials — ^it is
not too much to say that it offered a chance of creating confidence
in the Porte, and of achieving the pacification of the provinces.

Lord Derby has charged the Northern Courts with having, in the
Berlin Memorandum, invented a new system of diplomacy. They
had drawn up their measures together without any sort of consulta-
tion with the other Powers,” and then invited their adhesion. And
much credit has been claimed for the energy with which this
alleged encroachment of the Northern Powers was resented. But
the papers presented in Parliament give a different impression.
From them it is evident that, till June at the earliest, i.e. till after
the epoch of the Berlin memorandum, Lord Derby (except so far as
he expressed a general concurrence in the Andrassy note) gave no
attention whatever to the internal affairs of Turkey, and that his
efforts were concentrated on material means for putting down the
insurrection. Before the xindrossy memorandum was communicated
to him, he formally approved of the separate consideration by the
Northern Powers of the grievances of the subjects of Turkey;^ and
ho did not afterwards resent it. Writing to Lord A. Loftus on
May 8 ho records a conversation with Count Schouvaloff, which must
have given Count Schouvaloff an impression that the English Govern-
ment did not wish to take part in the Berlin conference then im-
pending, and which probably gives the reason why the invitation to
take part in it, which, on May i>. Lord Augustus Loftus **had
reason to believe ” would be given to the British and French (and
no doubt the Italian) xVmbassadors, was withheld. It is difficult, in
sliort, not to suspect that both the resentment actually manifested in
regard to the separate action of the Northern Powers and the subse-
quent indications of on intention hereafter to consider the internal
condition of Turkey, with a view to proposing some considerable
changes, are the commencement of a quite new policy, imposed on
the Government partly by events and partly by public opinion.

But, details apart, the policy adopted by the Government thus far
has this capital defect : — The events of 1854-6 placed England under
a strong moral obligation towards the Christians of Turkey ; and, if
she is to have any policy at all in South-Eastern Europe^ it is akq
her interc^ to win the confidence of the Christian pqpulationtf
(1) Lo]^ Derby to Sir A Bnohanan, Dee. 11, 187^*

306

TUSEXT nr BT7SOFE.

past services and known good-will to the Porte, and her power at
sea, give her an influence there, which she might have exercised on
behalf of the Christians, far in excess of that of any other Power ;
while her command of able administrators, accustomed to deal with
populations of hostile religions, and 'with the agrarian difflculties
of an oriental country, give her peculiar means of determining in
detail the best advice to give to the Porte. If, in short, there ever was
an emergency in European politics, in which justice and policy
dexnanded an English initiative, it was this. A service was to be
rendered to humanity : a demonstration (almost certainly wholly
peaceful) made of the power and influence of England ; and allies
gained for the future. All these opportunities have been hitherto
missed ; and the Christians left, and the initiative abandoned, to
Austria-Hungary and Pussia — Powers biassed by the special interest
each has in a particular mode of manipulating” the Christians;
without influence with the l^orte ; and without the means England
has of giving wise counsels as to the special difflculties of the
Turkish Empire.

Will the future of Lord Derby*s administration of the Foreign
Office be more honourable to England than tlie past ? The actual
position of things, and Lord Derby’s own antecedents, give the
means and the opportunity for the resolute prosecution of a new
policy. The Porte has acquired military prestige ; feebleness can no
longer be imputed to it : it may therefore with honour make con-
cessions. England, and the present Government in particular, has
been an unfaltering friend of the Porte ; in the darkest hour never
permitting the popular voice to draw from it one hasty sentence in
qualification of that firm friendship. England, and the present
Government, therefore, are in the strongest position for tendering
advice in a manner not to be disregarded. The alliance of all
Europe awaits England, and is ready to accept her as a leader ; —
on the sole condition that the leading shall be firm, and.- the
work promise to be enduring. England has refused to press on
the Porte or to associate itself with schemes of administration
and projects of reform embodied in vague and general terms,
and framed without close and careful inquiry.”* The quiet which
must succeed the complete defeat of insurrectionary hopes will give
time for framing plans not open to those objections ; only let the
time be used promptly. Finally, England, at once remote from the
scene of the events that disturb Europe, and cosmopolitan in her
interests, can regard the contending creeds and races without
passion ; only, if she claims to play an European part, let not her
indifference and her remoteness medee her content with expedients ;
for the questions raised, if they receive now only a temporary
iduiion, may be raised again when the union of the Grpat Powers
has once more been broken by angry jealousies and vast ambitions.

Albert Hutson.

(l) hoxtL Derby to Count Sobouvaloff, Juue 29.

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

It is impossible to offer any definition of cruelty which shall leave
out of view the motive. A benevolent lady who has made her name
conspicuous amongst the uncompromising opponents of what is called
vivisection, is reported to have used very strong language in reference
to the doctrine of doing evil tliat good may come ; and there can be
no doubt that from the minds of many who have been forward in this
discussion it is necessary to clear away a fundamental illusion on
this score. The fallacy lies in the impossibility of giving any defini-
tion of many forms of what is called evil, excepting by taking into
consideration the results. The same deed changes its character
under diflerent conditions. To remove a sleeping infant from its
cradle, hold its limbs, open its mouth by force and make incisions
into its gums, is surely uii act which if it were done merely for the
pleasure of the excitement or from any other source of enjoyment
to the performers, is evil, unmitigated evil. If however, the same
deed be done with the object of relieving distress and warding off
convulsions, it is evil no longer. It is not easy to see how anyone
could object ill such a case to such forms of expression as that the
end justified the deed,” and that in this instance at least it was
lawful to do evil that good might come.^^ At any rate it is a
question of words and definitions only, for all will agree as to the
principles concerned, and the rule of conduct will be the same with
all. Now ill the case of a sane adult, it is pretty generally esta-
blished that it is not right, without his consent, to subject him to
pain even for his oi\m good ; but with regard to lunatics, children,
and the lower animals, no such law will hold. No one would contend
that an operation performed upon a dog, however painful in itself,
was cruel,” if the operator was skilful, did his best, and had as his
sole motive the benefit of the animal. It is true that we now and
then carelessly speak of “ a cruel operation” when we mean simply
a painful one ; but as a rule we arc careful to distinguish between
the two, and to impute cruelty only when we wish to imply our
belief that the pain caused was not necessary, and therefore either
wilful or the result of ignorance. I will take, therefore, as granted
the simple proposition, that upon a dumb animal, incapable of giving
consent, it is lawful without consent to inflict pain when the good
of the animal is the object. Wo come next to the more difficult
question as to lawfulness of inflicting vicarious suffering. Her^,
indeed, we have the real stumbling-block in reference to experi- ,
ments, for it must be granted that tWe is a natural and instinctive
sense of unfairness in causing paip to one animal for the benefit o£
another. Li the old time, and under different forms of belief, there
VftU XX. K.S. Y

308

ON CBUELTT TO ANIMALS.

was less scruple on such points than there is how, and it was hastily
assumed that a nation’s safety was cheaply purchased at the cost of
an individual life. W*c live, however, in a punctilious age ; and it
is perhaps not much to be wondered at, that among those who have
rejected in theology the notion of vicarious expiation there should
be some difficulty in admitting the morality of inflicting vicarious
pain. Yet it can surely be made clear that it is impossible to lay
down a hard-and-fast law in the matter, and that here as else-
where questions of degree have to be estimated, and judgment and
conscience brought to bear. Here as elsewhere the responsible man
is bound to avoid crotchets, and of two evils to choose the loss. If
the health and comfort of twelve dogs were in danger unless an
inch wore cut from the tail of a thirteenth, there surely could bo no
hesitation as to what ought to be done. At any rate he would be
the cruellest who hesitated longest. Yet, if the propriety of taking
action in a case such as this cannot be denied, the principle under
discussion is granted. AVo have seen, first, that it is wise, humane,
and good to give pain when wo are sure that advantage will result ;
and, secondly, that it is not necessary that the advantage should
accrue to the precise individual pained. It is sufficient to know that
it will accrue to some one, and that it will certainly exceed the
suffering caused. If there is doubt it will be wise to hold the hand,
but if there is certainty it is almost criminal to hang back. There
are circumstances under which wo must do evil that good may
come ; we must be cruel in order to bo kind ; we must inflict pain
in order to produce pleasure.

I cannot but think that these considerations very much narrow
the ground of controversy with those opponents of experiments on
animals — the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Miss Cobbe, Mr. Curtis May,
and others — who trj" to base their opposition on principle,” and assert
that such experiments arc never justifiable. It is clear that the
question is, whether or not it is anything like certain that good will
follow them. To some of the largo class who arc fond of dispiTtaging
their own species, it might perhaps seem easier to grant the lawfulness
of experiments if they were designed solely to aid discovery for the
benefit of animals. But if we once admit that the infliction of vica-
rious suffering may be justifiable, we certainly cannot introduce any
arbitrary limitations as regards species. If a dog may be sacrificed
to save the lives of a dozen other dogs, it may also bo sacrificed to
save a baby or its mother. It is sentimentalism run mad to see any
difficulty in admitting this. It follows, then, that such sacrifices are
matters of expediency, and that they are more than justifiable when
the result is certain. We come, then, to the question. Are the
e(X|ierimeiits to which biologists have been accustomed to resort
ju^ijfied their fruits P Is there enough of certainty as to promised
gain to warrant their continuance P Before discussing tiiis point, let
me potest that the decision on this point must be left to those

ON CRUELTT TO ANIMALS.

309

who alone arc qualified to judge. It is hopeless for any lady, how-
ever eminent in jjhilanthropy, however famed in literature — or,
indeed, for any class of women or men, excepting trained physiolo-
gists, to form an opinion of the slightest value on this point. ]V[ay
I further hint, without rudeness, that it is almost an impertinence to
try. On such a matter, as in a thousand others, society must trust a
specially qualified class. It must believe, as, indeed, it has every
reason to do, that the humanity of this class is on a fair average
with that of mankind generally, and that no pain will bo inflicted
which does not promise an adequate gain.

Here I must ask to be allowed a digression. Do we not, in
several important respects, take a false and maudlin view of our
relations to what wo call the domestic animals ? We speak of the
debt between us, which really is mutual, as if it were all on one side :
we call them our slaves, our drudges, and delight to speak of man as a
tyrant and oppressor. It should be remembered, however, before we
disquiet ourselves too much by phrases of this kind, that our evidence
comes only from one side. It is man himself w’ho is the sole accuser,
and his knowledge of what the animals themselves think is but very
imj)erfcct. Could we really ascertain their feelings we should
probably find that they look up to man witli feelings of lively
gratitude and reverence, and regard him as a most beneficent deity.
It is reserved for man himself to look still higher ; our sheep and oxen,
could they reason at all on such a subject would, in all probability,
stop at a lower platform of theology, and render their worship to
man as the cause, so fur as they are concerned, that the hill-sides are
covered over with flocks.

There can be no doubt, whatever, that the animal world has
gained greatly by the gradual subjugation of the earth which its
head and leader has accomplished. Man has led on the other animals
to victory, lie Inis treated them, it is true, much as great generals
have treated the rank and flic, sometimes with consideration, and
sometimes with hut little. On the whole, however, there can be
no hesitation in saying that his gains have been theirs also. Not
only has the number of animals capable of existing on a given space
been much increased by the industry and ingenuity of man, but their
conditions of life have been much softened. Many of the so-called
natural checks to the increase of population have ceased to operate,
and, to a large extent, our domestic animals are no longer exposed
to any material risk from hunger or severity of weather. Many of
them, indeed most, are better protected in these respects than are
large portions of the human family. Everything possible is also
done to secure them against the attacks of other animals, and to keep
&em from the many risks of accidental death which surround them
in a wild state. As a rule their early stages of life are surroimded by
every luxury* and are, no doubt, periods of the utmost enjoynmil^
It is true that as age advances and incapacities creep , over theoiSt

310

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

some,^ — ^horses, for instance, — are in risk of losing many of their privi-
leges, and of being exx>osed to more painful conditions as regards
labour, food, and rest ; but this happens after all only to a minority,
and it is one of the drawbacks to the happiness of long life,
from which man himself has by no means been able tb escape.

If I have been successful in my argument that the animals of our
houses, stables and farms have been great gainers by their domes-
tication, so far as numbers in existence and protection in the enjoy-
ment of life are concerned, I am prepared yet further to urge that
they have also made a great moral gain. Wo have not only
protected them, and immensely favoured their increase, but we have
civilised and half-humanised them. If to be a man be better than
to be a gorilla, then to be a shepherd dog, a pointer or a spaniel, is
better than to be a wolf. As are the low enjoyments and narrow
perceptions of a Fiji compared w'ith those of a subscriber to the
Fortnightly Review, so probably is the moral and intellectual nature
of the rude and savage progenitor of the dog to his ennobled offspring,
‘‘the friend of man.” Dogs, horses, cattle, have done much for us,
but such are the arrangements under which wo and they hold our
lives, that we have in the process been enabled, whilst pursuing in
the main our own good, to do far more for them.

If of need we, I feel sure, afflict our consciences with many pangs as
to the ** loss of liberty,” which the birds and animals that W'e
have attached to our service have incurred. In the vast majority of
instances such fancied loss is not felt in the least. So rapidly do
most animals accommodate their tastes and feelings to changed
circumstances, that a few months of cajitivity, if taken young, will
in most instances suffice to eradicate the longing for old pursuits, and
to substitute another class of tastes. A parrot caught young, and
carefully tended in a cage, will decline its freedom, and if put loose
in an apple-tree on a summer morning, wrill soon steal back into its .
prison. The apparent monotony of its life, as measured by Jiiuman
feelings, is not felt as such by it, and provided it be well supplied w’ith
food and water, pity for its lot is more than w^asted. It is the
same in all probability with canaries, doves, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and
most of our household pets ; their nature has either in one or many
generations received such modifications that they no longer regard
their associations with man as other than an honour and a gain.

I have had two reasons for entering upon this line of argument
and suggestion. First I have desired to set at rest the qualms of
some refined and delicate consciences which might, could they
attain to better vigour, not only enjoy lifo more for themselves,
but contribute more also to the enjoyment of others. But secondly,

. (1) Let M point out that it is only those of the domestic animals which we do not
eat whiflh are liable to suffer in old age. So fiir from its being cruel to eat horses, it
would be the reverse, for instead of their being worked to the end erery horse would
be secure of a fbw months xdSt and luxury before his death

ON CRUELTT TO ANIMALS.

311

and perhaps more importantly, I have wished to argue against the
supposition that we owe a sort of debt to our domestic friends which
ought to bind us to an exceptional rule of conduct in their favour.
Such an opinion is based on sentimentality, and is contrary to
common sense. We owe to dogs, cats, and horses, the same honour-
able allegiance which is due to all that lives, and no more. Wo
must not sacrifice the interest of any individual horse, cat or dog,
without adequate object, nor must we inflict a single pang of
imnecessary pain. If we do so we are cruel, whether the victim bo
a dog or a tadpole, and in each instance the cruelty is measured by
the absence of motive, or the smallness of tho motive in proportion to
the pain caused, and not by any fanciful bonds of indebtedness,
which exist in the case of the mammal and are absent in that of the*
batrachian. It will be obvious that I have put aside the influence
upon the mind of the oiierator, and for the present consider only
the rights of tho different animals.^

]My argument has been that man and animals are members of one
commonwealth ; or, to use a yet more common illustration, that W(‘
are sailing in one boat, that it is futile to allege diversity of interests,
and useless to claim for any one immunity from that suffering which,
although fulling with apparently unequal incidence, is part of the
lot of all. We cannot change our destiny, or make the world per-
fect upon another plan.

If a sheep could understand the returns of human mortality, great
w'ould be its exultation at the preponderance of births over deaths.
“ Two thousand more bom than died in liondon alone last month !
And then the doctors more and more insist that mutton is the
best kind of meat ; only think what a lot more of us they'll have to
keep. Why they’ll have to plough up that prickly moor and
make it grow clover and turnips for us, and drain that marsh where
we are in such risk of the rot. Very likely they’ll give up ever
killing us before we are full grown. And next spring, why I really
believe old John will sleep every night in the field, for fear some of
our lambs should die. Hurrah for increase of population; down
wnth Vegetarians, the Dialectical Society, and Malthus ! Long may
men love mutton ! ”

I do not in the least exaggerate in putting such sentiments into
the mouth of an intelligent sheep ; and if I were to attempt to find

(1) There have been perhaps few circumstances broug^ht to light in the recent dis-
cussion on the subject of vivisection more humiliating than the ease with which a
certain section of the public can conceive it possible that the performance of painful
experiments may have in it an element of attractiveness to the operator. It might
have been expected that those who, for the first time, learned tliat such things were
occasionally done, would, judging from their own sentiments, have at once felt it to be
impossible that any should undertake them excepting under motives of compelling,
duty strong enough to overcome a natural repugnance of the most potent kind. What
we have witnessed has been, however, somewhat Afferent, and the revelation tl^tibavo
are amongst ns many who beliovo that there must be something hitiiiisicnUy pleasanif
in the infiicUon of suftWring is by no means one of an •anconrsgiug chawotw. *

312

ON CBI7ELT7 TO ANIMAXS.

words strong enougli to express the gratitude of pheasants to the
sport-loving propensities of man, I might even encounter greater
difficulty. A costly war of extermination continually waged against
weasels, hawks, and all other natural enemies ; copses allowed to grow
thick for cover, mid kciit scrupulously quiet ; the paths strewn with
Indian com, or even with raisins; little ricks of barley put up hero and
there in the woods, and left to be pulled to pieces during the dark days
of winter ; not to mention the yet more definite patronage afforded
by the breeding coop on the warm hillside, and the hard-boiled eggs
innumerable ; all these things must make a rational pheasant regard
man with the utmost warmth of love. And what is the penalty” that
he will have to pay ? Nothing more terrible than this ; that, before
he has suffered from sickness and old age, his existence shall end in
a manner which, compared with those by which most of his patrons
will have to depart, may be described as a luxurious death. lie will
experience perhaps ten minutes of annoyance and anxiety, a few
seconds of terror, one of pang, and then he will bo asleep for ever.
There is nothing so very fearful in this. But I shall be asked, what
about the wounded birds ? Well, as to the w'ounded birds, so-called,
nine out of ten of them fly off’ wounded only in their tail feathers ; a
few others hard hit die very quickly, almost as soon as they have
reached the next copse; a few are caught within twelve hours
by foxes ; and a very few live on, and recover pcrfcclly from
broken limbs, having never throughout their convalescence experi-
enced a tithe of the discomfort which awaits an average hos 2 )ital
patient..

The same might be asserted as regards all the other birds and
animals which are j^rotected for sport, with a few minor reservations
with respect to some, and as to sj^ecial modes of killing. Undoubtedly,
the less of what is called sport mixes with the mode of killing, the more
cruel as a rule docs it become. Trapping, ferreting, &c,, involve more
of suffering than hunting with dogs or shooting. If it were possible
to take the votes of the foxes, hares, rabbits, pheasants, partridges,
and other “ victims of sport,” as to the continuance or cessation of
the present customs of the country, ninety-nine out of every hundred
would hold up foot for the alfdus qm, and the remaining one would
be served right for his want of pluck, if left to die miserably of disease
or old age.

I contend then most seriously that so far as the happiness of the
animals is concerned it is the opponents of sport and not the sports-
men who are cruel. None who know the facts can doubt this. There
may be other reasons for attempting to restrict field sports, but with
bitt little exception there is nothing to be done which would not be

the disadvantage of the animals. 1 shall allude to the influence of
of these pirsuits on the minds of those who pursue thezq, farther on;
end ekstly I have nothing here to do with tha interests of agriculture
in reference to the preservation of game.

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

313

'It is very needful to remember that cruelty is not restricted to the
infliction of pain, but that the prevention of happiness, if intentional •
or the result of carelessness, must also rank as such.* There ih, in
fact, far more of this kind of passive cruelty than of the more active
form. It is astonishing how little, as a rule, our minds feel respons-
ible for the ha])piness which we only passively prevent. It is right
and natural tliat the infliction of suflering should always assume a
paramount place in our consciences, but that it should take the
almost exclusive pre-eminence which it habitually does is surely the
result of want of thought. All healthy animal life must rank as
happiness, and the man who permits the rearing of a t)uppy or
prevents the destruction of a dog which would, but for him, have
been killed, is a benefactor to dogs. "Without sophistry it might
really become a question, under some circumstances, as to whether
happiness procured might not be made to more than counterbalance
suffering inflicted. "We encounter this passive cruelt}' — or cruelty
by prevention of the happiness of existence — on alarge Scale in vege-
tarians and in the opponents of game preserving. I have already
alluded to it, but the subject is so important that I am tempted to
produce a further illustration. Let us suppose that Smith and Jones,
two hermits, have each a few acres of ground under their control.
Smith, objecting to the infliction of pain, keeps a cow for milk and
some hens for their eggs, and makes up the rest of his sustenance
from vegetables. Jones feeds rabbits and pigs with some of the
cabbages and some of the milk, and allows his hen to hatch a certain
number of her eggs ; he digs a fishpond in one comer of his plot and
stocks it, and he keeps a few sheep. It is true that he is compelled
every now and then to dismiss to the Silent Land a pig, a rabbit,
a lamb, or a. chicken, but is lie not still, in the long-run, a better
friend to animal joy than his neighbour P Smith simply abstains
from causing pain, Jones gives occasionally and unavoidably a little
pain, but ho is the cause of the produce of a vastly overbalanciDg
amount of pleasure. Smith, so far as I can sec, ought, in the end, to
be plagued on his dcuth-bcd with remorse, by the consideration that
his sentimental inhumanity has been the means of jirevcnting the
enjoyment of existence to numberless animals. A valued friend, an
American, whom I had invited to join me in an evening stroll with
a gun, replied, “I never shot a rabbit in my life, and until I am
starving I never will.’^ I admired bis purism, but thought, never-
theless, ** Still I am the friend of the rabbits, for were it not that
I enjoy shooting them, there would not by next Christmas bo a'
dozen left on the farm.”

To some extent it is even true that there is a set-off of happiness
in prolonged life to be placed against the sufferings caused to
animals by experiments. It is not by any means aH exparhnmte
that cause severe pain, or that entail much disccanfcnt
and in many instances it is the expeimei^’s eaq^^ msh

314

ON. GBI7ELTT TO ANIMALS*

.animal sliould surrive and regain good health. Many a dog> the
. subject of an experiment, has lived in happiness for months or years
afterwards. We must remember, also, that the onimals taken for such
experiments are always those which would otherwise have been killed.
It may well be doubted whether a dozen rats, if they could judge,
would not rather take their chance of a well-furnished laboratory
than be destroyed out of hand. It is the fact that in many instances
the animals, rabbits, guinea-pigs, or dogs, have been bred and reared
in comfort for this express purpose, and but for it would never have
been permitted to exist. Some experimenters are very careful not
only to reduce as far as possible the amount of pain, but also to
increase wliat we may call the subsequent compensatory enjoyment,
and no doubt more might be done in this direction. It may have
been noticed by some who have seen the architect’s' plans of the new
laboratory at Edinburgh, that the kennels, <&e., for the subjects of
experiment were to be built M'ith careful regard to comfort, and with
a south aspect. It may be open to most reasonable doubt whether
life in such an establishment even with average “ experiments ” in
prospect, is not from the dog’s point of view preferable not only to
death, but to the starved and persecuted existence of an oumerlcss
cur on the streets.

Putting aside, then, as obviously erroneous the assertion that it i&
wrong in principle to inflict pain except for the direct benefit of the
individual so hurt, we come to the question as to the circumstances
which justify such infliction. In this respect each separate group of
actions must be investigated on its own merits, and throe principal
questions have, I think, in each instance to bo put and answ'erod.

1st. What will bo the amount of suflering to the victim ? 2nd.
What amount of gain to others may reasonably be expected from
itP 3rd. Will the act be attended by injurious consequences to
the moral nature of the agent? By these tests the carnivorous
lady, the fox-hunting squire, the snail-drowning gardener, and the
experimental physiologist must all alike submit to be tried ; for they
are all alike implicated, directly or indirectly, in acts which cause
pain, and which require to be justified by results. I have already
incidentally alluded to most of these subjects ; but respecting scientific
experiments on animah, it may be convenient that I here attempt
to give answers to the questions ijroposed in more detail.

1, As to the amount of suffering caused to the victims. It may
perhaps be suflBicient to allege in general terms that the amount of
suffering incident to the performance of experiments on animals has
been in the popular mind most grossly exaggerated. Expressions
made use of in scientific books have been misunderstood, and narra-
tives of most exceptional occurrences have been accepted as if they
^atemjdifieif what was common. Every one who h^ read the
Enable report of evidence collected by the Boyal Commission must
(l) Quoted in the BqK)rt of the Boyal CommiBsion.

ox CBUELTT TO AXIHALS.

315

liave felt relieved at the discovery that neither by the testimony of
friend or foe could it be proved that any excesses or abuses had
taken place in England. To this effect on his own mind Mr. Forster
has borne public testimony^ and no doubt the other Commissioners
also folt it. As regards the vague reports which reach us respecting
the doings in foreign laboratories, it behoves us to receive them with
caution and charity. For the most part they are capable neither of
proof nor of disproof, and in many cases the testimony upon which
they are for the present based is open to much doubt. Those prone
to believe the worst may profitably bo reminded that, in early
days of this agitation, a statement w^as gravely published to the
effect that a certain ophthalmic teacher recommended his pupils to
acquire dexterity by operating on the e 3 '’es of animals, without
stopping to be made to understand that the cj'es meant were those of
dead sheep. The evidence of one witness before the Commission
would have been amusing had it not been disgraceful, both as regards
knowdedge and honcsth% in respect to the erroneous statements
which he had put in circulation, and his refusal to acknowledge
them when they wore pointed out.

2. The sum total of suffering caused by experiments on animals as
practised in England, may be confidently asserted to be exceed-
ingly small, and such as a very moderate scientific gain might be
easily held to counterbalance. I shall pass, then, to the second and
more difficult question, as to ^chnt hind and amoimt of gain mag be
cjrpccfed to result from them.

The verj” different estimates w^hich different minds form of the
advantages likelj" to accrue from the energetic prosecution of biolo-
gical and pathological pursuits, is no doubt one of the main causes of
the divergence of opinion as to the propriety of experiments involv-
ing pain. One man looks confidently to a better comprehension of
the law's of life, as the main means of human advancement, and for him
the term human advancement” implies increased order, comfort, and
happiness for all the more w'orthy forms of life. To him man is the
entrusted hierarch of the world, and to increase his knowledge is to
enlarge his sphere of sj^mpathy, and to fit him better for the duties
of his august post. No wonder that a scientific man, with such a faith
in him, thinks but lightly of a little temporary pain, in comparison
with the realisation of his hopes. He is not merely in search of
panaceas for special maladies, or for little definite bits of ipetail
discovery in reference to the causes of cancer and consumption. He
is se^ng general knowledge, having faith in it, and feeling sure
that it will include all details. His hope is not so much to be able
to hang up a few lanterns here and there in the darkness, as to let in
a daylight so broad and strong that it shall fill every nook and
corner with, clearness. If I were asked to come to pi^cular% I
would say that the discoveries of new laws as to the way in wh^
the nerviw system influences health, mind, and character; of mm/

316

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS,

facts, as to tlie special uses of food and the influences which make up
climate ; and of fresh means (possibly of the simplest and most easily
applicable kind) by which health may bo favoured and disease p^-
vented, are only a few among his aspirations.

Opposed to or contrasted with him wo have men who cither from
senility, or constitutional conservatism, want of imagination, or simply
from ignorance, scarcely foci cither hope or desire as to the further
progress of knowledge. They assert that man’s head is clever
enough if only his heart were warmer, and they look upon medicine
much as if all that a doctor had to do was to got up the contents of
a receipt book alroiidy quite suiEcicntly full of physiology and
biology. That I am not drawing too severe a portrait will, I think,
be admitted, if I am allowed to cite here a letter addressed to the
Eoyal Commission by Sir George Duckett, of Damj)ton. This
gentleman is at the head of the list of tho Committee of tlu'
Society for the Abolition of Vivisection, and he was invited by the
Commission to attend and communicate to them the facts which had
induced him to become active in the matter. ITis letter in reply is
typical of the views of a large number of those who have taken part
in that agitation, and as such it is valuable, and well deserv('s such
publicity as can be given to it. Under date December 12 th of
last year, he writes : —

“Siu , — 1 shall of course bo ready to attend on the Vivisection Commission,
but as my testimony is in no way connoctod with any ()orsonal t‘xiw ricnce, and
that I can simply express my horror and repugnance that in a Clirie?tisiii coun-
try such monstrosities should bo X)ormitted, it might bo dcMiablo to state this
to Lord Cardwell, espociully us I can only attend at some personal inconveni-
ence. All that I could say would be what tho major part of tlio kingdom
would say — that tho practice of vivisection, an abomination introduced from
the Continent, is horrid and monstrous, and goes hand in hand with atheism.
Medical science has arrived probably at its extreme limits, and lias little to
learn, and nothing can bo gained by repetition of experiments on living

tlTlitnnla .

“ I am, &C.”

‘ In a subsequent letter, Sir George Duckett positively declined to
attend the Commission, but spoke of the hellish practice of sub-
jecting animals to torture,” and appended the names of six gentle-
men, three or four of them surgeons, whom ho believed to share his
opinions. It wdll be scon, then, that a want of faith in the further
progress of s&ieiice is one of the mental conditions which favours an
attitude of opposition to these experiments.

Not only are there some who think, with Sir George Duckett,
that medical science has reached its extreme limits,” but there
lire others who, far too well-informed for such a blunder, yet
feel ddubtful as to whether experiments are of much use in aiding us
in its pursuit. It is in this class that almost aU the^ medical men
who are in any degree opposed to the practice are to be found, and
their influence in spreading a similar belief amongst the public has

ON GBTTELTT TO ANIMALS.

317

been considerable. Noristborc^ indeed, tbe slightest doubt that the
notion so prevalent amongst the inexperienced — that a single ex-
periment may set at rest a single question, much as a gardener
might decide the nature of an unknown seed by simply sowing it
once — ^is an utter mistake. The problems of physiology arc very
complex, and need for their solution endless patience and persever-
ance. It is quite true that experiments have to be done over and
over again, and that not unfrcquently a whole series may appear to
have been ■wasted when, as sometimes happens, they are confuted
by a fresh scries made under more favourable circumstances. But
we must allege that the result comes at last, that it is often a gain
of priceless value, and a gain for all time. Nor is it a matter
upon which the less informed ought to seek to influence or restrict
those who arc more so. Phj’^siologists alone can judge as to the kind
of evidence needed, and the amount and degree of repetition ■w'hich
arc essential, and to them the decision ought to bo loft.

I am not concerned to attempt here any detailed citation of the
gains which have accrued to science from experiments on animals.
I wish rather to rest my argument upon the immense value of science
in its widest sense, and upon the general testimony of those engaged
in its advaiicomont, as to the absolute necessity for such experi-
ments. We cannot always easily trace the sources whence our
increments of knowledge come, and nothing, I must repeat, is more
foolish than to attempt to naiTow the scope of those who are willing
to engage in its pursuit.

Dr. Bridges, in an able article in this Review for J uly last, inves-
tigated the evidence for the assertion that we owe the invaluable
discovery of the circulation of the blood to experiments on living
animals. Ilis general conclusion was that Harvey had before sufB-
cient facts from other sources to have enabled him to dispense ■with
experiments, and that we ought rather to attribute his discovery
to peculiar qualities in Harvey’s mind, than to anything special
in his modes of research. It may be quite true that there are
numerous facts which look to us, who now know' the secret, as if they
ought to have revealed even to a lower genius than Harvey’s this
simple but most important fact. It is, nevertheless, certain that no
one else had so interpreted them, and that Harvey himself thought
that ho was indebted to experiments. His words are explicit : ** At
length, and by using greater and daily diligence, having frequent
recourse to vivisection, employing a variety of animals for the
purpose,” &c. It seems safer to trust to such a declaration than
to any conjectural reasoning. No doubt many facts from many
sources helped up to the discovery, and such will be the case in
all future discoveries. If we wish for a crop, wo must not be ^ring •
of our seed. .

I come now to the last, and as many will hold by. the

818

ON ckCelty to animals.

important, question of the three, that, namely, which concerns the
influence tchich the performance of nuch ejrpmmenta is likefy to exert
upon the minds of those irho practise or icitness them. There are not
a few who, if ever so well convinced that carnivorous habits, field
sports, and experiments on animals were severally in the long run
justifiable (as conducing in the main to the increase of happiness
both in men and animals), would yet find it hard to believe that
they could without degradation to their own minds induce them-
selves to take any other part in them than that of abettors. Many
a person would rathe!* forego poultry and game altogether, than take
any share in killing the birds. Such minds arc also easily led to
believe that tiiere must be something degrading to those who take
such a part. It does not, however, by any means follow^ that this
is so. Our mental endowments probably differ within wider limits
than we are inclined to allow for, and it is by no means certain that
any good would result from attempts to equalise us. The man who
stops to feel pain at the death of a fallen partridge, is one w*ho
probably has but a half zest for the sport and its surroundings.
If he had, his mind would be too much pre-occupied to admit of
sentimentality. It is the same with the physiologist and with the
surgeon. In each instance intentness upon their work and its
results saves their minds from the pain of useless sympathy, and also
probably from any of that blunting which the conscious suppression
of sympathy would entail. There arc happily few, very few, who
can in the first instance perform experiments on animals without piin,
and many to wkom probably science might have been much indebted,
had they resorted to them, have been deterred only by this sentiment.
When such a feeling rises to the height of becoming an obstacle to the
performance of obvious duty, it should surely rank as nothing better
than a sentimental weakness. To resist it under such circumstances
and with such motive.s is not likely to weaken the moral sense. Its
indulgence may indeed be productive of more serious losses, and may
easily bring about a diminution in that vigour of character which
helps so much on the hapjuncss of life. There are indeed no limits to
the extent to which a sentimental dislike to giving pain, even for
good ends, may be developed by cultivation. The poets Cowper and
Wordsworth, both by nature sentimental and introspective, through
life cultivated this side of their characters, and with results which^
although beautiful in some respects, were not without their grave
drawbacks. Both of them came to entertain a profound distrust of
science and of investigators, and in both the consciousness of misery
U3ii disorder in the world assumed proportions which probably im-
paired their usefulness and robbed them of their proper joy in life.
Thm aiu many circumstances under which a little dulness and some
laek of the imaginative faculty are a decided advantage Jbo the mind,
It needs only to have well cultivated the habit of realising what you

ON CEinSLTT TO ANIKALS.

319

gee^ and what is to follow it, to bring the mind into such a frame
that the meeting a butcher’s boy with a flock of lambs is enough to
spoil all the pleasure and profit of a summer evening’s walk. Nothing,
indeed, but the habit of overlooking or refusing to recognise, prevents
our being distressed by similar feelings at every hour of the day.
It is possible te developc such a delicacy of sentiment, that the
vegetable world shall be also included, and until it may become
impossible not only to kill a rabbit, but to order the felling of a
tree, or the stubbing of a useless hedge. Yet this is surely morbid,
and is far less to be desired than the more robust type of character,
which pursues happiness with energy and shuts its eyes to unavoidable
pain.

A boy will go to sec an ox felled — the majority of boys would
if permitted — but it is not from pleasure in killing or from delight
in infliction of pain. There is excitement in the event, the
subjugation of a big strong animal, which may in its wrath become
even dangerous, and, lastly, the curiosity to sec something fresh and
much apart from the ordinary events of life. A passion for fre-
quenting slaughter-houses may even, in rare instances, be developed,
but I do not recollect ever to have heard of a father who had to con-
tend against his son’s partiality for the calling of a butcher. Nor
do butchers Iheraseivcs become cruel beyond other people, nor do
they ever, I believe, manifest any degree of pleasure in the suffering
which, in the course of their vocation, they are obliged to cause.
Callous, in a certain sense, they may be, but it is only in reference to
that which must be done; no general degradation of character results.

It is the same with the surgeon, the j^olice magistrate, the sports-
man, and the physiological experimenter. So long as the acts we
perform are based upon good motives, so long arc our sentiments free
from any material risk of injury. It is probably consistent with fact
that amongst our magistracy those show themselves least regardful of
the pain they cause who are newest to the vocation, and, further, that
the most severe sentences usually come from a class which takes no
share in x^hysiological research, and but rarely indulges in field sports.
Those who took principal parts in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror
were not the re})rescntativcs of any special classes ; nor, on the other
hand, is thoro the slightest ground for believing that those whose
doily pursuits have familiarised them with the sight of pain, have at
any period in the history of our species furnished more than their
average proportion of men notorious for inhumanity.

The operating surgeon docs not become fond of the knife as he
grows older ; rather it is well known that the reverse occurs, that
with advancing years and diminished pleasure in enterprise, a
comparative reluctance to resort to operations comes on. Nor
certainly does the profession of surgery blunt a man’s sumptibility as
regards suffering in general. Those who protested against the

320

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

experiment at Norwich were all of them surgeons, and chief amongst
them was one who, of all other living men, has perhaps been most
familiar with deeds of blood in the operating theatre.

Sportsmen are, as a rule, remarkable for their humanity. That
neither the pleasures of the field nor the duties of the physiolo-
gical laboratory have in themselves any bad effect on a man’s kind-
ness of heart, is well illustrated by the fact that amongst the most
vigorous opponents of vivisection are veteran sportsmen,, and
amongst those most alive to the iniquities of fox^^hunting and
partridge-shooting — arc found men familiar with physiological
research.

This essay, which I must now bring to a close, bears, I fear, upon
its face but too clear evidence of having been put together in a
hurried manner for it to be necessary for me to apologize for append-
ing a summary at its end.

My chief objects in writing it have, I think, been to ask atten-
tion : —

1. To the importance of distinguishing between giving pain and
cruelty, and to insist,

2. That cruelty occurs only when the pain is caused wilfullj%
and without justifying cause,

3. That there are no abstract laws of right and wrong as to the
infliction df pain by man on animals, and that each instance must
be justified or otherwise by the results aimed at.

4. That it is very important to remember lliat the preven-
tion of happiness is a form of cruelty, and that many social customs
which are often accused as cruel, arc really productive of much
collateral animal happiness.

5. That in a general way it would bo a wiser and far more
successful course on the 'part of the humane to endeavour to augment
animal happiness than merely to reduce pain.

6. That the practice of experiments on animals with a View
to increase of knowledge is certainly justified, and is likely in the
aggregate to increase the happiness both of animals and men.

7. That it is unwise and unfair, a sort of treason against
progress, for the uninstructed in any science to endeavour by force
to obtrude their opinions as to the manner in which the science shall
be prosecuted.

Lastly, I may confess that perhaps my principal motive in putting
these remarks together has been to convince those whoso consciences
are over tender as regards the general condnict of man to the other
animals, and its influence upon their happiness and our own moral
devdlopment, that there is comparatively little reason for self-accu-
sation.

Jonathan HiTtchinson.

A WOED ON GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

I lUVE often, on previous occasions, felt bound to urge, not only the
evils of indiscriminate almsgiving, but the duty of withholding all
such gifts as the rich have been accustomed to give to the poor. At
the same time I have realised so fuUy how tremendous the responsi-
bility of abstaining from such gifts is considered by the donors, that
I have not thought they could act on my advice without themselves
seeing that it would bo merciful as well as wise to withhold such
gifts. I have, therefore, usually said, ‘‘ Look for yourself, but look
with the sound of my words ringing in your ears.'' And those words
have boon distinctly to proclaim that I myself have no belief what-
ever in the poor being one atom richer or better for the alms that
reach them, that thej" arc very distinctly worse, that I give literally
]io such alms myself, and should have no fear for the poor whatever
if any number of pecjplc resolved to abstain from such alms. But,
on the other hand, I have long felt, and feel increasingly, that it is
most important to dwell on the converse of the truth.

The old forms in which charity expressed itself arc past or pass-
ing away. With these forms arc we to let charity itself pass ? Arc
there no eternal laws binding us to charitable spirit and deed ? Arc
we, M’ho have become convinced that doles of soup, and loans of
blankets, and scrubbing-brushes sold at less than cost-price, have
failed to enrich any class — have helped to cat out their energy and
self-reliance — thereon to tighten our purse-strings, devise new
ainiiseiueiits for ourselves, expend more in luxurious houses and
expensive dinners, cultivate our own intellects, indulge elegant
tastes, and float down the stream of Time in hajjpy satisfaction that
the poor cannot be bettered by our gifts — in fact must learn self-help
— we meantime going to flower-shows, or picture galleries, or studying
systems of political economy ? Arc the old words, “ Bear ye one
another’s burdens,” to pass away with the day of coal tickets ? Have
the words, Ye arc members one of another,” ceased to bo true be-
cause our tract and dole distribution has broken do^ra ? Arc there
no voices still speaking in our hearts the old commandment, “ Love
one another ” ? Is that love to bo limited henceforward to the
pleasant accpiaintanccs who call upon us, and like the same poets,
and cun talk about Eomc and the last clever book ? Or is it, as of
old, to go forth and gather in the feeble, the out-of-the-way, the
poor P Is humanity, is nationality, is citizenship too large for our
modem love or charity to embrace, and shall it in the future be
limited to our family, our successful equals, or our superiors ? Are
wo going to look out and up, but never down P The love of our
Master Christ, the love of St. Francis, the love of Howard, the love
of John Broavn, the burning love of all who have desired to serve
others, has been a mighty, all-embracing one, and specially tender,

822^ A WOBD ON GOOD CITIZENSHIP. ,

specially pitiful. All modem forma of almsgiving may pass and
cliangey but this lovo must endure while the world lasts. And
if it endure, it must find expression. Charity such as this
doe% find expression. It finds expression, when healthiest and
most vigorous, not in weak words, but in strong acts. If we
would not be mere butterflies and perish with our empty, fleeting,
self-contained lives ; if wo would not be fiends of intellectual self-
satisfaction living a cold and desolate life ; if we would not leave the
hungry, the forlorn, the feeble, to perish from before us, or to rise
and rend us ; we must secure such love as that which lighted and
intensified the lives of heroes and of missionaries, and struggle to see
what scope there is for acts which shall embod}’' that love.

The mistake the old-fashioned donors make is not in their bene-
volence — that cannot be too strong — but they forget to watch
whether the influence of their deeds is beneficent. I should not at
all wonder if even thirty years ago doles were more beneficent than
now. If the poor had at that time not learned to trust to them, if
they came straight from the loving hands of those who cared to
step aside from beaten tracks to know and serve the poor, they must
have had very different results from any they have now, when people
hate learned to depend on them, when they arc almost the fashion,
and often the relief for the consciences of those who don’t feel
quite easy, if they give no time, no heart, no trouble, nor any money
to the poor. I have no manner of doubt that just now gifts of
necessaries are injurious. What form, then, shall our cliarity take
in the immediate future ?

Take that question home to yourselves, each of you who has not
answered it already ; ask it of yourselves, not as if you were asked
to take the position of hero, or martyr, or professed philanthr(»pist,
but as if I had said to you, What do you, us a man or woman, feel
bound to do beyond the circle of your family for those who are
fellow-men, fellow-citizens, many of them sunk into deep ruts of
desolation, poverty, and sin?” Find some answer, live up to it, so
shall your own life, your own city, your own age be better.

I will tell you what kind of answer I think may come to
you. First, as to money, which is pcrhai>s the most difficult thing
to give without doing harm. Don't sit down under the conviction
that therefore you arc to buy or spend it all for yourself. If you
like to earn rather less, to pause in middle life, and give full thought
to spending what you have, or, better still, to give time which
might have made money, I shall certainly not complain of you.
But do not think there is no scope for beneficent gifts of money
because soup-kitchen6 and free dormitories are not beneficent.
There is abundant scope for large gifts, large enough to please the
proudest of you. Are there no great gifts of open spaces to be made
for the 'rich and poor to share alike in the time to come — spaces
which absll be to the child no more corrupting than the moun-

A WORD ON GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

323

tain to the Highlander, or the long sea horizon to the fisher-
man’s lad P They will come to him as an inheritance he possesses
as a Londoner or an English child ; most likely being taken, like
light and air, straight from God, and not in any way tending
to remind him of men’s gifts, still less to pauperise him. But if a
memory of you as a donor comes to liim as youth ripens into man-
hood, long after you are in your grave, the thought is more likely to
incite him to make some great, abidingly useful gift to his town,
than in any way to paralyse his energies or weaken his self-respect.
Are there no jJaces to plant with trees, no buildings to erect, no
libraries to found, no schohirships to endow ? Are there, moreover,
none of those many works to achieve, which a nation, a municipality,
a vestry, first needs to see done, to learn the use of by using, though
finally such a community may prize them more by making an effort
to establish similar ones ? For instance, no one would dwell more
urgently than I on the need of making healthy houses for the poor
remunerative ; and now the problem of doing so has been in a great
measure solved. But do wo not owe this to the efforts of a body of
men in earlier time who were content to lose money in experiments
and example ? Pioneers must risk, if not give, largely, that we may
travel smoothly over the road which they made with such difficulty.
Are we in turn never to be pioneers ? Are there no improved public-
houses, iioimproved theatres, no better machinery for collecting savings
which we may establish and give our money to ? The same kind
of far-sighted i^oHcy might be adopted with all smaller gifts, making
them either radically beneficial in themselves, as when they train an
orphan for service-work in life, or give rest to an invalid whose
sjn iiigs are exhausted ; or they may be gifts of things which no one
is bound to provide for himself, but which give joy, as if you helped
to put coloured decoration outside our schools or houses in dingy
streets, or invited a company of poor people whom you know to tea
in your garden during the fair June weather, or even sent som^
shells from your home by the sea to small children in one of our few
Ijondon playgrounds.

But to leave the question of money and come to the greater gift
of time. Here especially I would beg you to consider whether you
have each of you done your utmost. A poor district in Loudon is
inhabited by a number of persons, ill educated, dirty, quarrelsome,
drunken, improvident, unrefined, ijossibly dishonest, possibly vicious.
I will assume that- we, too, have each of us a good many faults —
perhaps wc arc selfish, perhaps we arc indolent. I am sure all the
virtue is not among the rich ; but certain advantages they surely
have W'hich the poor have not — education, power of thinking out
the result of certain courses of action, more extended knowledge of
facts or means of acquiring it, habits of self-control, habits of clean-
liness*, habits of temperance, rather more providence usually, much,
more refinement, nearly always a higher standard, perhaps a high

VOL. XX. N.S. X

A WORD ON GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

B24

standard, of honesty. ITave wc not a most distinct place among the
poor if this be so P Is not our very presence a help to them P I have
knovm courts nearly purified from very gross forms of evil merely
by the constant presence of those who abhorred them. I know, you
probably all know, that dirt disappears gradually in places that
cleanly people go in and out of frequently. Mere intercourse
between rich and poor, if wc can secure it without corrupting gifts,
would civilise the j)oor more than anything. See, then, that you do
not put your lives so far from those great companies of the j)oor
which stretch for acres in the south and east of Loudon that you foH
to hear each other speak. See that you do not count your work
among them by tangible result, but believe that healthy human in-
tercourse with them will be helpful to you and them. Seek to visit
and help in parishes in which this is recognised as an end in itself.

Again, we have got our population into a state of semi-paiqjerism
from which individuals and societies cannot raise them merely by
abstaining from gifts by guardians or withdrawing out-relief. We
have accustomed them to trust to external help, and only by most
patient individual care shall wc raise them. Neither can wc persuade
donors, unaccustomed to study the future results of their acts, to
abstain from distinctly unwise charity unless wc arc among them,
unless wc are ready, too, to consider wdth them about each human
soul, which is to them and to us inexpressibly precious, what is at
the moment the wise thing to do. ITave most gentlemen any idea
how much this work needs doing in the poor districts of Loudon ?
The Charity Organization Society came forw’ard now’ some years ago
to try to get the donors of London to meet and consider this question
in detail in every district in London. It undertook to look carefully
into all cases brought to its oflfices, and to report the results of its
inquiries. It did a of undertake to make additional gifts except
where they might secure enduring benefit, but it said to the donors,
^‘Associate yourselves, relieve after due thought, after investigation,
and in conjunction one wdth another.’’ That Society has made
great way ; it has established offices in every district, and has
provided an investigating machinery of inexpressible value, of w’hich
every Londoner may avail himself. But, I ask, where arc the
donors? Where are the representatives of the various relieving
agencies P The clergy P The district visitors P There are of course
a certain number who have co-operated heartily, but, as a rule, I am
forced to reply very mournfully, after all these years they arc for tho
most part going on with their ill-considered relief very much the
same, not using the machinery, and reproaching the Charity Organ-
ization Society that is not relieving largely, and that it is not
composed of themselves ! Now, till these relieving agencies come in
and take their share, and give their gentler tone to the somewhat
dly machinery, are these offices to be places where more r6utine
business is done by an agent who cannot have much individual care

A ^VOUB OX GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

323

for the applicants P Or is there to be any one to watch over each
applicant with real charity, questioning him gently, thinking for
him sympathetically, seeking for him such help as will be really
helpfid P In some offices in the poor districts wo have found hono-
rary secretaries to do this, and splendid work it has been. Wherever
such help has been forthcoming the poor have been well served, and
the old-fashioned donors have been in some measure won to wiser
courses of action. But many more such honorary secretaries are
needed, and that imperatively and immediately. Are there no men
of leisure, with intellect and heart, who will come forward ? I have
known no such urgent need as this in the many years I have spent
face to face with the poor since I came to London — ^the need of
advice, of sjTnpathy, of thoughtful decision for poor man after poor
man, as he comes up to our offices at a crisis in his life.

One more instance of the way help can be given, and I have done,
for I will not dwell now on the good that might be done by the
purchase and management of the houses of the poor, by teaching,
by entertaimnenls for them, by oratorios, by excursions, by the
gift of beautiful things. I will only point out now that as guardians
or vestrymen the most influential sphere of work presents itself.
If you try to got into Parliament, many men of equal education,
high principles, and refinement probably contest the place with you ;
if you succeed they fail ; if you try to make a name among the
fashionable or wealthy circles, you may or may not succeed ; but if you
fail no one misses you much. But if, instead of trying to get high up,
y’'ou were to try to get domi low, w'hat a position of usefulness you
>vould have ! You would learn much from vigorous colleagues, much I
fancy which would make you ashamed ; but what might not they gain,
w*hat might not the locality gain, if the administration of its aflSsiirs
were carried on under the influence of men of education! As
guardians, how you might see to the poor, leading them back to
independence in most thoughtful ways, w’atching over them indi-
vidually that no wrojig was done ! As vestrymen, how you might be
on the side of far-siglited expenditure or the suppression of corrup-
tion 1 When I sec people all struggling to get up higher, they seem
to me like people in a siege, who should all rush to defend the
breach for the glory and renown of it, and trample one another to
death, and leave little doors un watched all round the town.

I don’t the least mean that the works I have suggested are tho
only ones, or the best, or even that always that kind of work may
be best. The form that charity takes in this age or in that must bo
decided by the requirements of the time, and these I describe may
be as transient as others. Only never let us excuse ourselves from
seeking tho best form in the indolent belief that no good form is
possible, and things are better left alone ; nor, on the other hand,
weakly plead*that what we do is benevolent. We must ascertain that
it is really beneficent too. Octavia Hill.

ROBKSriEErtE.*

TL

The Girondiiis were driven out of tlio Convention Ly the insurgent.
Parisians at the beginning of June, 1703. The movement may be
roughly compared to that of the Independents in our own llebellion,
when the army compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the rresby-
tcrian leaders from the parliament; or, it may recall Pride’s
memorable Purge of the same famous assembly. Both cases illustrate
the common truth that large deliberative bodies, be they never so
excellent for purposes of legislation, and even for a general control
of the executive government in ordinary times, arc found to be
essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If there are any
historic examples that at first seem to contradict such a proposition,
it will be found that the bodies in question were cl(><c aristocracies,
like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Rome in the
strong days of the Commonwealth ; they were never the creatures
of popular election, with varying aims and a diversified political
spirit. Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of
assemblies for the old divine right of monarchies. Those who
condone the violence done to the king on the Tentli of August, and
even acquiesce in his execution five months afterwards, arc relentless
against the violence done to the Convention on the Thirty-first of
May. We confess ourselves unable to follow this transfer of the super-
stition of sacrosanctity from a king to a chaml)er. !Xo doubt, the sooner
a nation acquires a settled government tlie better for it, provided the
government be efficient. But if it be not efficient, the mischief of
actively suppressing it may well be fully outweighed by tlic mischief
of retaining it. 1 have no wish to smooth over the perversities of a
revolutionary time; they cost a nation very dear; but, if lill the
elements of the state are in furious convulsion and uncontrollable
effervescence, then it is childish to measure the march of events by
the standard of happier days of social peace and political order. Tlie
prospect before France at the violent close of Girondin supremacy
was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront in the
history of the world. Rome was not more critically j>laced, wlicn
the defeat of Varro on the plain of Canine had broken up her
alliances and ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Nether-
lands had no gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment wdien the
Prince of Orange had left them, and Alva had be(m appointed to
bring them back by rapine, conflagration, and murder, under the
loathed yoke of the Spanish tyrant.

(1) Concluded from tlie previous number of ihc Foitnightly Keview.

BOBESPIEEBE.

827

Lot us realise the conditions that Robespierre and Danton and the
other Jacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one
division of the fugitive Girondiiis was forming an army at Caen ;
in the south-west another division was doing the same at Bordeaux.
Marseilles and Lyons were rallying all the disaffected and reactionary
elements in the south-east. La Vendee had flamed out in wild
rebellion for Church and King. The strong places on the north
frontier, and the strong jflaccs on the east, were in the hands of
the foreign enemy. The fate of the Revolution lay in the issue of
a struggle between Paris, with less than a score of departments
on her side, and all the rest of Franco and the whole European
coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not the
worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary
cause. Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as
that of the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the
sections into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say,
for lialf-a-dozen individuals to take upon themselves to represent the
fourteen or fifteen hundred other members of a section. But what
better proof can wc have that if France was to be deb'vered from
restored feudalism and foreign spoliation, the momentous task tnust
be performed by those who had sense to discern the awful peril, and
energy to encounter it ?

The Oirondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution
of the king had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the
ruder and more robust party w^ho had forced that startling act of
vengeance upon them. Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-
operating with Danton or with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria
w'crc not more redoubtable or more hateful to them than was Paris,
and they wasted in futile recriminations about the September
massacres or the alleged peculations of municipal officers, the time
and the energy that should have been devoted without let or
interruption to the settlement of the administration and the repulse of
the foe. It is impossible to think of such fine characters as Vergniaud
or Madame Roland without admiration, or of their untimely fate
without pity. But the deliverance of a people beset by strong and im-
placable enemies could not wait on mere good manners and fastidious
sentiment, when these comely things were in company vriih the most
stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a political party. How
oan w^e measure the folly of men who so missed the conditions of the
problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost within earshot
of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult >vere ofiered to the national
representation, the departments would rise, ** Paris would bo annihi-
lated ; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
whether suph a city had ever existed ! ** It was to no purpose that
Danton urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the

328

BOBESPIEKBE.

Riglit poured incessant malediction on the Left, and tho wild!
shrieking hate with which the Left retaliated on the Eight. The
battle was to the death, and it was the Girondins who first menaced
their political foes with vengeance and the guillotine. As it hap-
pened, the treason of Dumouriez and their own ineptitude destroyed
them before revenge was udtliin reach ; such a consummation waa
fortunate for their country. It was the Girondins whose want of union
and energy had by the middle of 1793 brought France to distraction
and imminent ruin. It was a short year of Jacobin government
that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation together again,
and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the Seine had ence
more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries, ever since the
days of Odo, Count of Paris and first king of the French, not merely a
capital, but France itself, ^ its living heart and surest bulwark.’

The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an
achievement was the Committee of Public Safety. The French
have never shown their quick genius for organization with more
triumphant vigour. While the Girondins were still powerful, nine
members of the Convention had been constituted an executive com-
mittee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a kind of permanent
cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In tho summer of 1793
the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these twelve
were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical adminis-
trators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Jfext came the
directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by
Billaud de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whoso business it
was to translate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy.
This famous group was Eobespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.

Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions
were mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and tho prisons,
but in all serious aflairs the two Committees deliberated in common.
There were also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the-
Convention; they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and
usually not with more zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruc-
tion, of finance, of legislation, of the adminstration of justice, and a.
host of other civil reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was
by-and-by to reap tho credit. Tliese bodies completed the civil
revolution, which the Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies had
left so mischievously incomplete, that as soon as ever the Convention
had assembled, it was besieged by a host of petitioners praying them

eacplain and to pursue the abolition of the old feudal rights. Every-
thing had still been left qncertain in men’s minds, oven upon that
greatest oflall the revolutionary questions. Tho feudal division of tho

BOBESPIEBBE.

m

committee of general legislation had in this eleventh hour to decide
innumerable issues, from those of the widest practical importance,
down to the prayer of a remote commune to be relieved from the
charge of maintaining a certain mortuary lamp which had been a
matter of scignorial obligation. The work done by the radical
jurisconsults was never undone. It was the great and durable reward
of the struggle. And we liavc to remember that these industrious and
efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies and functionaries
whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionary constitution of
1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of Public Safety.

It is hardly possible even now for anyone who exults in the
memory of the great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people,
to stand unmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert
Delorme reared for Catherine dc’ Medici, and which was thrown into
ruin by the madness of a band of desperate men in our own days.
Lewis had walked forth from the Tuilcrics on the fatal morning of
the Tenth of August holding his children by the hand, and lightly
noticing, as he traversed the gardens, how early that year the leaves
were falling. Lewis had by this time followed the fallen leaves into
nothingness. The palace of the kings was now styled the Palaee of
the Xation, and the new republic carried on its work surrounded by
the outward associations of the old monarchy. The Convention after
the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had formerly been the
palace theatre ; and fierce men from the Faubourgs of St. Antoine
and St. 3Iarceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shouted savage
applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago the
Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladies
and proudest grandees of France. The Committee of General
Security occupied the Pavilion do Marsan, looking over a dingy
space that the conqueror at Ilivoli afterwards made the most dazzling
street in Europe. The Committee of Public Safety sat in the
Pavilion de Flore at the opposite end of the Tuilerics on the river
bank. The approaches were protected by guns and by a body-
guard, while inside there flitted to and fro a cloud of familiars, who
have been compared by the enemies of the groat Committee to
the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Anyone who had
business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomj^
corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end.
The room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth,
was incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the
morning and worked until one ; from one to four they attended the
sittings of tho Convention. In the evening they met again, and
usually sat until night was far advanced. It was no wonder if their

330

BOBE8FIERRE.

hue became cadaverous, their eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows
stem, their glance pre-occupiod and sinister. Between ten and
eleven every evening a sombre piece of business was transacted,
which has half effaced in the memory of posterity all the heroic
industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours. It was then that
IFouquicr-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an account of his
day’s labour ; how the revolutionary tribunal was working, how many
had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how small
had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night.
Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains,
stood the Jlonstcr itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of the
blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.

*

Ilobesj)ierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee
appeared to bo exceedingly strong. It w^as, however, for a long
time, much less strong in reality than it seemed : all depended upon
successfully playing off one force against another, and at the same
time maintaining himself at the centre of the see-saw. llobcspierro
was the literary and rhetorical member of the band ; ho was the
author of the strident manifestoes in which Europe listened with
exasperation to the audacious hopes and unfaltering purpose of the
new France. This had the effect of investing him in the eyes of
foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority over the
government. The truth is that Robespierre was both disliked and
despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker
of useful phrases ; he in turn secretly looked down upon them as
the man who has a doctrine and a system in his head, always looks
down upon the man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Com-
mittee had been in the place of a govcniment wliieh has no oppo-
sition to fear, Robespierre would have been one of its least powerful
members. But although the government was strong, there were at
least three potent elements of opposition even within the ranks of the
dominant revolutionary party itself.

Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an
influence that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of
the Committee of Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Con-
vention ; second, the Commune of Paris ; and thirdly, the Jacobin
dub. The jealousy thus existing outside the Committee w'ould have
made any failure instantly destructive. At one moment, at the end
of 1793, it was only the surrender of Toulon that saved the Com-
mittee from a hostile motion in the Convention, and such a motion
would have sent half of them to the guillotine. They were reviled
by the extreme party who ruled at the Town Hall for not carrying
the policy of extermination far enough. They were reproached- by

BOBESPIEBKE.

331

Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy too far.
They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like Bazirc,
-who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by-and-by to
prove only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the
frontier should make himself their master. The key to the struggle
of the factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of
the summer of 1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Com-
mittees not to part with power. The drama is one of the most
exciting in the history of faction ; it abounds in rapid turns and
unexpected shifts, upon wliich tlic student may spend many a day
and many a night, and after all he is forced to leave off in despair
of threading an accurate way through the labyrinth of passion and
intrigue. The broad traits of the situation, however, are tolerably
simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of government which
the people could be induced to accept. “ The rights of men and the
new principles of liberty and equality,*^ Burke said, “ were very
unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
tranquillity and order. The factions,” he added with fierce sarcasm,
« were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission
to the laws, from tlie principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition.
They endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of w’hich
they hoped to keep the si)irit of murder safely bottled up and sealed
for their own purposes, without endangering themselves by the
fumes of the poison wdiicli they prepared for their enemies.” This
is a ferocious and passionate version, but it is substantially not an
unreal accoimt of the position.

Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant
Terror. Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten
sons of Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn
the sword upon them, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the
sandy shore : —

“Bos dura ct rogui no vitas mo talia cogunt
Moliri.”

And that pithy ehapler in Machiavelli’s Prince which treats of
cruelty and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question
when Terror should be considered to liavo done as much of its work
as it could bo expected to do. This difference again was connected
with difference of conception as to the type of the society whicli was
ultimately to emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes,
the guiding spirit of the Committees, was without any conception

332

ROBESPIEBRE.

of this kind. He was a man of force pure and simple. Donton
was equally untouclied by dreams of social transformation; bis
philosophy, so far as ho had a definite philosophy, was in spite of
one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and materialism,
when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent character,
as in the case of Danton, and, — to take a better-known example, in the
case of Jefierson, — usually leads to a sound and positive theory of
politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational social
hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud expected
a millennium ; their only aim was to shajic France into a coherent
political personality, and the war between them turned upon the policy
of prolonging the Terror after the frontier^ had been saved and the
risings in the provinces put down.

There were, however, two parties who took the literature of the
century in earnest ; they thought that the hour had struck for trans-
lating, one of them, the sentimentalism of Rousseau, the other of
them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot, into terms of politics
that should form the basis of a new social life. The strife between
the faction of Robespierre and the faction of Chaumette was the
reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of the great literary
strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean Jacques and the
writers whom ho contemptuously styled llolbachians. The battle of
the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
The struggle between Hcibert and Chaumette and the Common
Council of Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robes-
pierre on the other, was the concrete fonn of the deepest controversy
that lies before modem society. Can the social union subsist without
a belief in God? Chaumette answered yes, and Robespierre cried no.
Robespierre followed Rousseau in thinking that anyone who should
refuse to recognise the existence of a God, should be exiled as a
monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and sociability. Chaumette
followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly in 1783 that
belief in God as well as submission to kings would bo at an end all
over the world in a very few years. The Hebertists might have
taken for their motto Diderot’s shocking couplet, if they could have
known it, about using

“ Lcs entrailles du pretro
Au defaut d’un cordon pour etrangler los rois.”

The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of
them accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed
legislator to impose any belief and any rites ho pleased upon the
country at his feet. The theism or tho atheism of the new France
depended, as they thought, on the issue of the war for authority

in Mie Oommon Covmcfl. of Paris, and. tTae
Committee of Public Safety. That was the religious side of the
attitude of the government to the opposition, and it is the side that

BOBESPIEBBE.

333

possesses most historic interest. Billaud cared very little for religion
in any way ; his quarrel with the commune and with Hubert was
political. What Eobespierre^s drift appears to have been, was to use
the political animosity of the Committee as a means of striking foes
against whom his own animosity was not only political but religious
also.

It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence
and confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all
his love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to
himself with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced
to literary statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a
politician to sec the practical urgency of restoring material order,
whatever spiritual belief or disbelief might accompany it. The
prospect of -a rallying point for material order was incessantly
changing ; and Robespierre turned to different quarters in search of
it almost from week to week. He was only able to exert a certain
limited authority over liis colleagues in the government, by virtue of
his influence over the various sections of possible opposition, and this
was a moral, and not an ollicial influence. It was acquired not by
marked practical gifts, for in truth Robespierre did not possess them,
but by his good character, by his rhetoric, and by the skill with
W’hich ho kept himself prominently before the public eye. The
effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many limits and incessant
variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech from him threw
his listeners into ecstasies, that have been disrespectfully compared to
the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries or the hysterics of
Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We naturally think of
those grave men who a few years before had founded the republic in
America. Jefferson served with Washington in the Virginian
legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards said
that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time ;
while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter
three sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good
authority that for eighteen months there was not a single evening on
which he did not make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech,
and that never a short one.

Strange as it may seem, Robespierre^s credit with this grim
assembly was due to his quite Philistine respectability and to his
literary faculty. lie figured as the philosopher and bookman of
the party ; the most iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to
respect the scholar, provided they arc sure of his being on their side.
Robespierre had from the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices
of some too excitable allies. Ho distrusted the noisy patriots of the
middle class, who cumed favour with the crowd by clothing them-
selves in coarse garments, clutching a pike, and donning the famous
cap of red wooUen which had been the emblem of the emaucigation.

334

ROBESPIERRE.

of a slaTO in ancient Eomc. One night at the Jacobin Club, Robes-
pierre mounted the tribune, dressed \rith his usual elaborate neatness,
and still wearing powder in his hair. An on-looker unceremoniously
planted on the orator’s head the red cap demanded by revolutionary
etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol on the ground with
a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of much austerity.
Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration, or to the
embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolism that
strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as ready as
others to use the arts of the theatre for the liturgy of patriots. One
of the most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of the
Revolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen
who enrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to
suppress the rebel Whites in La Vendee. One day he advanced too
close to the enemy’s posts, intrepidly beating the cliarge. He was
surrounded, but the peasant soldiers were loth to strike. “ Cry Long
live the King^^ they shouted, "or else death!” "Long live the
Republic,” was the poor little hero’s answer, as a ball pierced his
heart. Robespierre described the incident to the Convention, and
amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded that the body of the young
martyr of liberty should bo transported to the Pantheon with special
pomp, and that David, the artist of the Revolution, should bo charged
with the duty of devising and embellishing the festival. As it
happened the arrangements were made for the ceremony to take place
on the Tenth of Thermidor — day on which Robespierre and all
Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodier import.
Thermidor, however, was still far off ; and the red sun of Jacobin
enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine for ever.

Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt
every instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far
removed as possible from that position of Dictator which some historians
with a wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the
moment when they are enumerating the defeats which the party of
Hebert was able to inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother
Club itself. They make him the sanguinary dictator in one sentence,
and the humiliated intriguer in the next. The latter is much the
more correct account of the two, if wo choose to call a man an
intriguer who was honestly anxioxis to suppress what he considered a
wicked faction, and yet had need of some dexterity to keep his own
head upon his shoulders.

Tn the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hebert
and Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Chris-
tianity in Franco. The doctrine of D’Holbach’s supper-table had for
a shorf space the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power
on its side. It was the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in

BOBESPIERltE.

335

Europe as a political force. This makes it one of the most remark-
able moments in the Eovolutioni just as it makes the Revolution
itself the most remarkable moment in modern history. The first
political demonstration of atheism was attended by some of the
excesses^ the folly, the extravagances, that marked the growth of
Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story compared with
the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism. The
worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they were
intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true ; but this charge can-
not lie in the mouth of persecuting churches.

Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It is
perfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that
the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women
on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris
through the Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond tho
region of dialectic ; it rather brings us down to the level of the poor
sectaries whom it cruslies. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The
fault of the atheists is that they knew no better than to borrow the
maxims of the churchmen ; and exen those who agree with the dog-
matic denials of the atheists — ^if such there be — ought yet to admit
that the more change from superstition to reason is a small gain, if
the conclusions of reason arc still to be enforced by the instruments
of superstition. Our opinions arc less important than the spirit and
temper with which they possess us, and even good opinions aro worth
very little unless wc hold them in a broad, intelligent, and spacious
way. Now some of the opinions of Chaumette were full of enlighten-
ment and hope. lie had a generous and ^’ivid faith in humanity,
and ho showed the natural effect of abandoning belief in another life
b}'’ his energetic interest in arrangements for improving tho lot of
man in this life. But it would be far better to share the superstitious
opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like the Bishop in Victor
Hugo's superb novel, than to hold those good opinions of Chaumette
as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of
the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all
that great and precious pirt of our natures that lies out of the
immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can understand
how an honest man would abhor tho darkness and tyranny of the
Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests
of new light was inevitably to bring the new light into the same
abhorrence as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is
exactly what happened. In every family where a mother sought to
have her child baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have
the dying spirit of the old consoled by tho last sacrament, there
sprung up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed tho
churches and proscribed the priests.

How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the

336

EOBESPIEEBE.

solemn mysticism of tlie middle agee, suddenly turn to embrace a
^audy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was
outraged by apostate priests who, whether under the pressure of fear
of Chaumette, or in a very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degra-
dation, hastened to proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as
they filed before the Convention led by the Archbishop of Paris, and
accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the
vessels of silver and gold with which they had once served their holy
ofilces. Our enemies,’^ Voltaire had said, “ have always on their
side the fat of the land, the sword, the strong box, and the (wmiV/e/*
For a moment all these forces were on the other side, and it is
deplorable to think that they were as much abused by their new
masters as by the old. The explanation is that the destructive party
had been brought up in the schools of the ecclesiastical party, and
their work was a mere outbreak of mutinj'-, not a grave and respon-
sible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If, as Chaumette
believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely in that
faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous not
to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual acquisi-
tions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness of
the common people to leave their outworn creeds.

Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the
Goddess of Eeason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral
of Our Lady, Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calcu-
lation of the conditions. * You,^ he might have said to the priests, —
'you have so debilitated the minds of men and women by your
promises and your dreams that many a generation must come and
go before Europe can throw off the yoke of your superstition. But
we promise you that they shall be generations of strenuous battle.
We give you all the advantages that you can get from the sincerity
and pious worth of the good and simple among you. Wc give you all
that the bad among you may get by resort to the poisoned weapons of
your profession and its traditions, — ^its bribes to mental indolence, its
hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its tyranny in the closet, its
false speciousness in the world, its menace at the deathbed. With all
these you may do your worst, and still humanity will escape you ; still
the conscience of the race will rise away from you ; still the growth
of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose will go on, leaving ever
further and further behind them your dwarfed finality and leaden
moveless stereotype. We shall pass you on your flank ; your fieriest
darts will only spend themselves upon air. We will not attack you as
Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall explain you.
History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred
competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species.
From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity ; from being

KOBESPIEBHE.

837

the iiniido to millions of human lives^ it will dwindle down to a
chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma^ so Science
will dry it up ; the conception of law will silently make the
conception of the daily miracle of your altars seem impossible;
the mental climate Svill gradually deprive your symbols of their
nourishment, and men will leave your system not because they
have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it
has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church,
once so stout and fair and well laden with good destinies, is become
a skeleton ship ; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and
sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than ghosts of
dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
bay, down your ship will sink to the lowest bottom like lead or like
stone.’

Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men’s
minds to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a
bell through all distractions. None of these high things were said.
The temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priests
maltreated, the worshippers disi)ersod. The Commune of Paris
imitated the policy of the king of France who revoked the edict of
Nantes, and democratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of abso-
lutist Catholicism,

Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the
atheists. They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and
they afflicted him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar.
Hebert, however, was so strong that it needed some courage to
attack him, nor did Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face.
Rut he did not flinch from making an energetic assault upon
atheism and the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually
count his speech of the Twenty-first of November one of the most
admirable of his oratorical successes. The Sphinx still sits inexorable
at our gates, and his words have lost none of their interest. Every
philosopher and every individual,” he said, “ may adopt whatever
opinion he pleases about atheism. Anyone who wishes to make
such an opinion into a crime is an insensate ; but the public man or
the legislator who should adopt such a system, would bo a hundred
times more insensate. The National Convention abhors it. The
Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was
not to no purpose that it published the declaration of the Rights
of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps
that I have a narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice,
and a fanatic. I have already said that I spoke neither as an
individual nor as a philosopher with a system, but as a representa-
tive of the people. Atlmm is arisfocratic. The idea of a great being

3»8

KOBESFIEKHE.

tcho watches over oppressed innocence and punishes iriumphant crime is
essentially the idea for the people^ This is the scntimeiit of Europe
and the Universe; it is the sentiment of the Freneh nation. That
people is attached neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to
ceremonies ; it is attached only to worship in itself, or in other
words to the idea of an incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrong-
doers, the stay and comfort of virtue, to which it delights to render
words of homage that are so many anathemas against injustice and
triumphant crime.”

This is Robespierre’s favourite attitude, the priest posing as states-
man. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. Ho
first declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with
the most odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour.
Danton followed practically the same line, though saying much less
about it. “If Greece,” he said in the Convention, “had its Olym-
pian games, France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The
people will have high festivals; they will offer incense to the
Supreme Being, to the master of nature; for we never intended
to annihilate the reign of superstition in order to set up the reign of
atheism. ... If we have not honoured the priest of error and
fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest of incredulity :
we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall be an end
of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.”

There was an end of the masquerading, but the Ilebertists still
kept their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were
all equally impotent against them for some months longer. The
revolutionary force had been too strong to be resisted by any
government since the Paris insurgents had carried both king and
assembly in triumph from Versailles in the October of 1789. It
was now too strong for those who had begun to strive with all their
might to build a now government out of the agencies that had
shattered the old to jjicces. For some months the battle wfiich had
been opened by Robespierre’s remonstrance against atheistic in-
tolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes. The
battle ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
wings of the genius of demonic Hate. VerUIa regis prodeunt inferni ;
the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early
Church, settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity, Or it
recalls the fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and
Oligarchy in an old Greek town. We think of the day in the
harbour of Corcyra when the Athenian admiral who had come to
ddiiver the people, sailed out to meet the Spartan enemy, and on
turning- round to see if his Corcyrean allies were following, saw
them following indeed, but the crew of each ship striving in

SO^^SPUfiBJEUS*

339

enraged conflict with one another. CoUot d’Herbois had come
back in hot haste from Lyons^ where^ along with Foach4, he had
done his best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one
stone of the city shoidd be left on the top of another, and that even its
very name should cease from the Ups of men. Carrier was recdled
from Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the
exploits of the cruellest and maddest of the Boman Emperors. The
presence of these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to
the H^bertists. Though the alliance was informal, yet as against
Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgcnts, as well
as against Bobespierre, they made common cause.

Camille Desmoulins attacked Hebert in successive numbers of a
journal that is perhaps the one truly Uterary monument of this stage
of the revolution. Hebert retaUated by impugning the patriotism of
DesmouUns in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the
cflbrts of Bobespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the
sacred precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in
relation to other prominent members of the party whom they loved to
stigmatise by the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even
Danton himself was attacked (December, 1793) and the integrity of
his patriotism brought into question. Bobespierre made an energetic
defence of his great rival in the hierarchy of revolution, and the
defence saved Danton from the mortal ignominy of expulsion from
the communion of the orthodox. On the other hand, Anacharsis
Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of delirium, was less fortu-
nate. Bobespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for being a Grerman
baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for striking his
sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch. Even M.
Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the worst
page in Bobespierre’s life. Others have described Bobespierre as
struck at this time by the dire malady of kings — ^hatred of the
Idea. It seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is
to extinguish common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple
and disinterested character, and his possession of some rays of the
modern illumination, was one of the least sane of aU the men ^vho
in the exultation of their silly gladness were suddenly caught up by
that great w'hecl of fire. All we can say is that Bobespierre’s bitter
demeanour towards Clootz was ungenerous ; but then this is only
natural in him. Bobespierre often clothed cool policy in the
semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in any phrase he ever
used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the mark of true
generosity ; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no element
of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted
the atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was

VOL. XX. N.S. A A

340

BOBESPIEBBE.

thinking not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that
her execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, .and
he was so unmanly as to speak of her as la mepvimhU smir de Louis
XVL Such a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his
soul.

Yet this did not prevent liim from seeing and denouncing tho
bloody extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of
Parisian authority in the provinces ; nor from standing firm against
the execution of the Scvcniy-Three, who had been bold enough to
question tho purgation of tho National Convention on the Thirty-
first of May. Put tho return of Collot d’Horbois made the situation
more intricate. Collot was by his position the ally of Billaud, and
to attack him, therefore, was to attack the most powerful member of
the Committee of Public Safety. Billaud was too formidable. Ho
was always the impersonation of the ruder genius of the Revolution,
and the incarnation of the philosophy of the TciTor, not as a delirium,
but as a piece of deliberate policy. Ilis pale, sober, and concen-
trated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. lie had no gifts
of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the silence of
the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said by
contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyiena, Barere a jackal, and
Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.

Tho cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger,
jackal, and hyaena on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical
courage and timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that ho
had been premature ; and a convenient illness, which some suppose
to have been feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from
a scene where he felt that ho could no longer see clear. We
cannot doubt that both he and Bant on were ])crfectly assured that
the anarchic pai’ty must unavoidably roll headlong into the abyss.
But the hour of doom was uncertain. To make a mistake in the
right moment, to huny the crisis, was instant death. Robespierre
was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not confound
his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed
patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude and may demand
as much iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of
political energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like
the other, tal^g the initiative with force, had trained his sight.
The mixture of astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with
his stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton that
made his life worth exactly three months more purchase than
Danton’ s. It has been said that Spinozism or transcendentalism in
poetic production becomes Machiavellism in reflection; for the
same reasons we may always expect sentimentalism in theory to
become imder the pressure of action a very self-protecting guile.

BOBESPIERRE.

341

Eobespierre^s mind was not rich nor flexible enough for true states-
manship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the various
cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of
genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion.
They were in fact the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker
than his volition# Eobespierro was of a kind of spinster. Force of
head did not match his spiritual ambition. Ho was not, we repeat,
a coward in any common sense ; in that case he would have remained
quiet among the croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by-and-by have
come to hold a portfolio under the First Consul. He did not fear
death, and ho envied with consuming envy those to whom nature
had given tlie qualities of initiative. But his nerves always played
him false. The consciousness of liaving to resolve to take a decided
step alone, was the precursor of a fit of trembling. His heart did
not fail, but he could not control the parched voice, nor the twitching
features, nor the ghastlj^ P^dsy of inner misgiving. In this respect
Eobespierro recalls a more illustrious man ; we think of Cicero
tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide for him whether he
should order the execution of the Catilinariau conspirators. It is
to be said, however, In bis favour that he had the art which Cicero
lucked, to liide his pusillanimity ; Eobespierre knew himself, and did
his best to keep his own secret.

Ilis absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed
events to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in
dangerous action wliicli he had dreaded on the Tenth of August,
and dreaded on every other decisive day of this burning time. The
parly of tlie Commune became more and more daring in their invec-
tives against the Convention and tlie Committees. At length they
proclaimed open insurrection. But Paris was cold, and opinion was
divided. lu the night of the Thirteenth of March, Hebert, Chau-
mette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day Eobespierro recovered
sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. Ho joined his colleagues
of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the blow. On the
Twenty Fourth of March the XJltra-Ecvolutionist leaders were be-
headed.

The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily
followed by the second. The Eight wing of the opposition to the
Committee soon followed the Left down the ways to dusiy death,
and the execution of the Anarchists only preceded by a week the
arrest of the Moderates. When the seizure of Danton had once
before been discussed in the Committee, Eobespierre resisted the
proposal violently. Wo have already seen how he defended Danton
at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process of purifi-
cation in the winter. What produced this sudden tack P And how
came Eobespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had

A A 2

342

BOBESPIEBBE.

angrily discountenanced in February ? There had been no change
in the policy or attitude of Danton himself. The military opera-
tions against the domestic and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly
in the way of success, than Danton began to meditate in serious
earnest the consolidation of a republican system of law and justice.
He would fain have stayed the Terror. “ Let us leave something/’
he said, “ to the guillotine of opinion.” He aided, no doubt, in the
formation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, but this was exactly in
harmony with his usual policy of controlling popular violence with-
out alienating the strength of popular sympathy. The process of
the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was fairer — until Robes-
pierre’s Law of Prairial — ^than people usually suppose, and it was
the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself compared with the
September massacres. ‘'Let us prove ourselves terrible,*’ Danton
said, “to relieve the people from the necessity of being so.” His
activity had been incessant in urging and superintending the great
levies against the foreigners ; he had gone repeatedly on distant
and harassing expeditions as the representative of the Convention
at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he found
time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young and
for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas for
the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this
which made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and
it was this which made the Committee of Public Safety his
implacable enemy.

Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order
and humanity, not continue to .sui)port Danton after the suppression
of the Hebortists as he had supported him before ? The common
and facile answer is that he w'as moved by a malignant desire
to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the evidence seems to
support Napoleon’s opinion, that Robespierre was incapable of voting
for the death of anybody in the world on grounds of j)crsonal enmUy.
And his acquiescence in the ruin of Danton is intelligible enough
on the grounds of selfish policy. The Committee hated Danton for
the good reason that he had openly attacked them, and his cry for .
clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest against their
system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up his
mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which
only, he could work out his own vague schemes of power and recon-
struction. And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee ?
The famous insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had boon
the first to organise against a government, had just been chilled by
the fell of the Hebortists. Least of all could this force bo relied
iqpoh to rise in defence of the very chief whose every word for
many weeks past had been a protest against the Communal leaders.

bobesfieeiue:. 343

In separating lumself from the Ultras^ Danton had cut off the great
reservoir of his peculiar strength.

It may bo said that the Convention was the proper centre of
resistance to the designs of the Committee^ and that if Danton and
Bobespierre had united their forces in the Convention, they would
have defeated Billaud and his allies. This seems to us more than
doubtful. The Committee had acquired an immense preponderance
over the Convention. They had been eminently successful in the
immense tasks imposed upon them. They had the prestige not
only of being the government — so great a thing in a country that had
just emerged from the condition of a centralised monarchy ; they had
also the prestige of being a government that had done its work
triumphantly. Wo are now in March. In July we shall find that
Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that
policy ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any
more successful four months earlier ?

What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality
to defend Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so ;
but then to run risks for chivalry’s sake was not in Robespierre’s
nature, and no man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own
character. His narrow head and thin blood and instable nerve,
his calculating humour and his frigid egoism, disinclined him to all
games of chance. His apologists have sought to put a more re-
spectable colour on his abandonment of Danton. The precisian,
they say, disapproved of Danton’s lax and heedless courses. Danton
said to him one day: — “What do I care? Public opinion is a
strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.” How should the
puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had
given various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robes-
pierre not to ieel insults offered to the most able and devoted of
his lieutenants? What was more important than all, the accla-
mations with which the partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the
Ultras, made it necessary to give instant and unmistakable notice to
the foes of the Revolution that the goddess of the scorching eye
and fiery hand still grasped her axe of vengeance.

These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable
dread of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of
not seeming practical and political enough. And having made up
his mind that the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the
Dantonists, he became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly
seen that the waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner over-
comes the agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object

344

BOBESPIEBBE.

with a vindictiye tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. Robespierre,”
says M. D*H4ricault, ‘'precipitated himself to the front of the
opinion that was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order
to keep his usual post in the van of the Revolution, in order to
secure tho advantage to his own popularity of an execution which
the public voice seemed to demand, he came forward as the author
of that execution, though only the day before he had hesitated about
its utility, and though it was in truth far less useful to him than it
proved to be to his future antagonists.”

Robespierre first alarmed Danton’s friends by assuming a certain
icy coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the
faction of tho so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often
did, to his native village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a
little clearness of sight in the night that wrapped him about. He
was devoid of personal ambition ; he never had any humour for mere
factious struggles. His, again, was tho temperament of violent force,
and in such types the reaction is always tremendous. The indomi-
table activity of the last twenty months had bred weariness of spirit.
The nemesis of a career of strenuous Will in large natures is apt to
be sudden sense of the irony of things ; in Danton, as with Byron
it happened afterwards, the vehemence of the revolutionary spirit
was touched by this desolating irony. Ilis friends tried to rouse
him. It is not clear that he could have done anything. The
balance of force, after the suppression of tho Hebertists, was irretriev-
ably against him, as calculation had already revealed to Robespierre.

There arc various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost
ou the eve of Danton’s arrest, and having parted with sombre dis-
quietude on both sides. The interview, with its champagne, its
interlocutors, its play of sinister repartee, may possibly have taken
place, but the alleged details arc plainly apocryphal. After, jill,
‘ Religion ist in der Thiere Trieb,’ says Wallenstein ; ‘ the very
savage drinks not with the victim, into whose breast he means
to plunge a sword.’ Danton was warned that Robespierre was
plotting his arrest. “ If I thought he had tho bare idea,” said
Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, “ I would eat his
bowels out.” •Such was the disdain with which the ‘giant of the
mighty bone and bold emprise’ thought of our meagre-hearted
pedant. Tho truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of
politics, and perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A
man may be a very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mis-
chief. And Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton.
With singular baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of
notes to serve as the material for tho indictment which Saint Just
Svas to present to the Convention, They comprised everything that

EOBESPIEBKE.

345

suspicion could interpi^t malignantly, from the most conspicuous
acts of Danton's public life down to the casual freedom of private
discourse.

Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the pro-
ceedings to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton
and others of its members, one only of their friends had the courage
to rise and demand that they should be heard at the bar. Bobes-
pierre burst out in cold rage ; he asked whether they had undergone
so many heroic sacrifices, counting among them these acts of “ pain-
ful severitj",'' only to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering
intriguers ; and he cried out impatiently that they would brook no
claim of privilege, and suffer no rotten idol. The w'^ord was felicitously
chosen, for the Convention dreaded to have its independence sus-
jiceted, and it dreaded it all the more because at this time its inde-
pendence did not really exist. The vote against Danton was unanimous,
and the fact that it was so is the deepest stain on the fame of this
assembly. On the afternoon of Ihc Sixteenth Germinal (April 5)
Paris in amazement and some stupefaction saw the once dreaded
Titan of the Mountain fast bound in the tumbril, and faring towards
the sharp-clanging knife. “I leave it all in a frightful welter,’’
Danton is reported to have said. ‘‘ Not a man of them has an idea
of government. ]lobesi)icrre will follow mo ; he is dragged down by
jne. Ah, better bo a poor fisherman than meddle with the govern-
ing of men ! ”

Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This
was the very day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet
quitted the friendly roof that for nine months had concealed him from
the search of proscription ; the same week he was found dead in his
prison. Wliile Danton was storming with impotent thunder before
the tribunal, Condorcet was wTiting those closing words of his Sketch
of Human Progress, which arc always so full of strength and edifica-
tion. ITow this picture of the human race freed from all its fetters,
— withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that of the enemies of
progress, and walking w'ith firm and assured step in the way of
truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight
that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with
which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is n6t seldom the
victim ! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives
the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence
of liberty. lie ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the
destinies of man : it is there he finds the true recompense of virtue,
the pleasure of having done a lasting good ; fate can no longer undo
it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recoUection of his persecutors can never follow him ; in which.

346

BOBESPIEKBE.

liTing in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity
of hi.s nature^ he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by
base fear, by envy ; it is hero that he truly abides with his fellows, in
an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and
that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights/'

In following the turns of the drama which was to end
in the tragedy of Thermidor, w^e perceive that after the fall of
the anarchists and the death of Danton, the relations between
Robespierre and the Committees underwent a change. He, who had
hitherto been on the side of government, became in turn an agency
of opposition. He did this in the interest of ultimate stability, but
the difference between the new position and the old is that he now
distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic with the ascendancy
of his own religious conceptions. How far the ascendancy of his
own personality was involved, wo have no means of judging. The
vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately aimed at
a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is always
the most difficult thing in the 'world to draw a lino bctw'een mere
arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification
of a man's personal elevation with the success of his public causo.
The two ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause
be a good one, it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with
him because he desires that his authority and renown shall receive
some of the lustre of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in
Napoleon Bonaparte for instance, is not that he sought power, but
that he sought it in the interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially
unmeaning personal ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need
not discuss the charge that he sought to make liimself master. The
important thing is that his mastery could have served no great end
for France ; that it would have been like himself, poor, barren, and
hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been seen on ^very
side. France had important military tasks to perform before her
independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was jealous
of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable government,
of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said a word
to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any of
these great d€l);)artments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
making use of men who were more happily endowed, than himself.
He had never mastered the excellent observation of De Retz, that of
all the qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as
being able to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even
legitimate suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this para-
lyses able secants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality
of soul, but' only that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.

The base of Robespierre’s schemes of social roconsWetion now

BOBESFIEBBE.

847

came clearly into view^ and what a base ! An official Supreme Being
and a regulated Terror. Tho one was to fill up the spiritual void,
and the other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is
to the credit of Eobespierre’s perspicacity that he should have recog-
nised the human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught
when we contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in
his dim and narrow understanding. Eousseau had brought a new
soul into tho eighteenth (jcntury by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession
of Faith : the most fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism
that religious literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent,
cloudy ; but the clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When wo
turn from that to the political version of it in Eobespierre's discourse
on the relations of religious and moral ideas with republican prin-
ciples, wo feel as one who revisits a landscape that had been made
glorious to him by a summer sky and fresh liquid winds from tho
gates of the evening sun, only to find it dead under a grey heaven
and harsh blasts from the north-east. Eobespierre's words on the
Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of deep feeling ; they
are a literary concoction ; never the self-forgetting expansion of the
religious soul, but only the composite of the rhetorician. He
thought he had a passion for religion ; what ho took for religion was
little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that ho was
insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But
here as in all else his aspiration was far beyond his faculty ; ho
yearned for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great
thoughts and great achievements, but his c^piritual capacity was as
scanty and obscure as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature
thus unequally yokes lofty objects in a man with a short mental
reach, she stamps him with the very definition of mediocrity.

How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously
thought that he should conciliate the conservative and theological
elements of the society at his feet by such an odious opera-piece as
the Feast of the Supreme Being ? This was designed as a triumphant
ripost to the Feast of Eeasoii which Chaumette and his friends
had celebrated in the winter. The energumens of the Goddess
of Eeason had now been some weeks in their bloody graves ;
by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to the supreme
enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Eobespierre persuaded
the Convention to decree an official recognition of the Supreme
Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade
in which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial,
June 8, 1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual
care. As he looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon tho
jubilant crowd in the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm.

0 Nature," he cried, how sublime thy power, how full of delight !

348

BOBESFIEBBE.

How tyrants must grow pale at the idea of such a festival ! ” In
X)ontifical pride he walked at the head of the procession, with flowers
and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound of chants and symphonies
and choruses of maidens. On the first of the great basins in the
gardens David, the artist, had devised an allegorical structure for
which an inauspicious doom was prepared. Atheism, a statue of
life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable group of human
Vicos, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them with
lofty wrath. Great arc the perils of symbolism. Robespierre
applied a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was liostile, or else
Atheism and Madness were damp. Tliey obstinately resisted the
torcli, and it was hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all
blackened by smoke, grinned a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy
rivals. The miscarriage of the allegory was an evil omen, and men
probably thought how much better the churchmen always managed
their coiijurings and the art of spectacle. There w’as a great car
drawn by milk-white oxen ; in the front were ranged sheaves of
golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses posed
with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a
bringing back of Ccrcalia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as
the most disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.

The famous republican Calendar, wdth its Prairials and Germinals,
its Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind,
though it was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic
base was just as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the
Feast of the Supreme Being. The association of worship and
sacredness wuth the fruits of the earth, with the forces of nature,
with the power and variety of the elements, could only be sincere so
long as men really thought of all these things as animated each bj’^ a
special will of its own. Such an association became mere charla-
tanry, when knowledge once passed into the positive stage. How could
men go back to adore an outer world, after they had found out the
secret that it was a mere huge group of phenomena, following fixed
courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable volitions of
their own? And what could bo more puerile than the fancifiil
connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life ?
This simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from
nomad times to the complexities of a modem society; therefore
to typify the Supremo Being as specially interested in shocks of
grain and in shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere
figure in an idyll, the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the
garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces and
stem master of the destinies of men. Ghaumetto’s commemoration
of.ihe Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance compared
Robeqiierre^s farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte
lui||;8aid, to select for worship man’s most individual attribute. If

349

they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain
to pay hpmage to that faculty in the human rulers of the world which
had brought the forces of nature, — its pluviosity, nivosity, germi-
nality, and vendemiarity, — ^under the yoke for the service of men.

If the philosophy of Eobespierre's pageant was so retrograde and
false, its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of pre-
sumptuous infatuation that anyone should feel so strongly as he did
that order could only be restored on condition of coming to terms
with religious use and prejudice, and then that he should dream
that his Supreme Being — a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a
poet’s georgic — should adequately replace that eternal marvel of
construction, by means of which the great churchmen had wrought
dogma and liturgy and priest and holy of&ce into every hour and
every mood of men’s lives. There is no binding principle of human
association in a creed with this one bald article. ‘ In truth,’ as I
have said elsewhere of such deism as Eobespierre’s, ‘one can scarcely
call it a creed. It is mainly a name for a particular mood of fine
spiritual exaltation ; the expression of a state of indefinite aspiration
and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are j"ou going to convert the
new barbarians of our western world with this fair word of empti-
ness ? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and take its
heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong, and cruelty,
and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of
heart wdth new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by
the thought of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract
creation of mctaj^hysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his
justice as our justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men?
It was not by a cold, a cliecrless, a radically depraving con-
ception such as this, that the church became the refuge of humanity
in the dark times of old, but by the representation, to men sitting in
bondage and confusion, of godlike natures moving among them under
figure of the most eternally touching of human relations, — a tender
mother ever interceding for them, and an elder brother laying down
his life that their burdens might be loosened.’

On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of
Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
memorable Law of the Twenty-second of Prairial. Eobespierre was
the draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all
laws ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous.
Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the ordered pro-
cedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before over went through the
atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised

350

BOBESPIEBBI!.

negation of seciirity for juBtice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a
fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in
authority: “He who would subordinate the public safety to the
inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an
imbecile or a scoundrel.’^ As if public safety could mean anything
but the safety of the public. The author of the Law of Prairial had
forgotten the minatory word of the sage to whom he had gone on a
pilgrimage in the days of his youth. “ All becomes legitimate and
even virtuous,” Helvetius had written, “on behalf of the public
safety.” Kousseau inscribed on the margin, The public safety is
nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.” What security was
possible under the law of Prairial ?

After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two
cardinal guarantees in state trials are accurate definition and proof.
The offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof
against an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial
violently infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial
equity. First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was
reduced. Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and
infinitely elastic kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, mis-
leading opinion, depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the
principles of the Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof
was to lie in the conscience of the jury ; there was an end of pre-
liminary inquiry, of witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused.
Any kind of testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal
or written, if it was of a kind likely to gain the assent of a man of
reasonable mind.

How what was Robespierre’s motive in devising this infernal
instrument P The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own
sake can only be held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans.
It is like the theory of the vulgat kind of protestantism that Mary
Tudor or Philip of Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood.
Robespierre, like Mary and like Philip, would have been as well
pleased if all the world w^ould have come round to his mind without
the destruction of a single life. The true inquisitor is a creature of
policy, not a man of blood by taste. What, then, was the policy that
inspired the Law of Prairial P To us the answer seems clear. We
know what was the general aim in Robespierre’s mind at this point
in the history of the revolution. His brother Augustin was then the
representative of the Convention with the army of Italy, and General
Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him. Bonaparte
said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity on the
rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to
Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners
— ^Tallien; Fouch^, Barras, Collot, and the rest — ^for the horrors they
perpetrated, and accusing them of ruining the revolution by their

BOBESFIEBRE.

351

atrocities. Again^ there is abundant testimony that Bobespierre did
his best to induce the Committee of Public Safety to bring those
odious malefactors to justice. The text of the Law itself ^scloses
the same object. The vague phrases of depraving manners and
applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were exactly calcu-
lated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to Bobes-
pierre the scandal of the Eevolution. And there was a curious
clause in the law as originally presented, depriving the Convention
of the right of preventmg measures against its own members.
Eobespierre’s general design in short was to effect a further purgation
of the Convention. There is no reason to suppose that he deliberately
aimed at any more general extermination. On the other hand, it is
incredible that, as some have maintained, he should merely have had
in view the equalisation of rich and poor before the tribunals, by
withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony to civic character from
both rich and poor alike.

If Eobespierre’s design was what we believe it to have been, the
result was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would
not consent to apply his law against the men for whom he had
specially designed it. The frightful weapon which he had forged
was seized by the Committee of General Security, and l^aris was
plunged into the fearful days of the Great Terror. The number of
persons put to death by the Eevolutionary tribunal before the Law of
Prairial had been comparatively moderate. From the creation of the
tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution of the Hebertists in
March 1794, the number of persons condemned to death was 605.
From the death of the Hebertists down to the death of Eobespierre,
the number of the condemned was 2,168. One half of the entire
number of victims, namely, 1,35G, were guillotined after the Law of
Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of
man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than
rich, those in whom life was almost spent no less than those in whom
its pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in
woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed
against ; he was seized in his bed at five in the morning J at seven
he was taken to the Conciergorie ; at nine he received information of
the charge against him ; at ten he went into the dock ; by two in the
afternoon he was condemned ; by four his head lay in the executioner’s
basket.

What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wicked-
ness that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger
from foreign or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive
something to well-grounded panic. The persecutions of an earlier
date in Paris were not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that
the city abounded in royalists and other reactionists, who were really
dangerous in fomenting discouragement and spreading confusion.

352

BOBESFIEBRE.

If there ever is an excuse for martial law, and it must be rare, the
French government were warranted in resorting to it in 1793.
Paris in those days was like a city beleaguered, and the world does
not use very harsh words about the commandant of a besieged town
who puts to death traitors found within his walls. Opinion in
England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory government to pass
a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a definition of treasonablo
offence as even the Law of Prairial itself. Windham did not shrink
from declaring in parliament that he and his colleagues were deter-
mined to exact “a rigour beyond the law,'* and they were as good as
their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly cither of cruel law or
cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years
before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of
harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson ot
William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the sc^ilp of a
female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would
have had quite as good a chance of justice from the Eevolutionary
Tribunal as at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who con-
demned Muir and Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the
government, with a brazen front, worthy of Carrier or Collot d’ Ilerbois
themselves, that if they woidd only send him prisoners he W’ould
find law for them.

We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in
these days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. Wo think
that the author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time
that there should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the
crimes of republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes
of kings and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher
air ; we ought to condemn wherever wo find it, whether on the side
of our adversaries or on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary
force for the processes of ordered justice. There arc moments when
such a readiness may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was
not one of them, either in France or in England. And what makes
the crime of this law more odious, is its association with the official
proclamation of the State worship of a Supreme Being. The scene
of Eobespierre’s holy festival becomes as abominable as a Catholic
Auto-da-fe, where solemn homage was offered to the God of pity and
loving-kindness, while flame glowed round the limbs of the victims.

Eobespierro was inflamed with resentment, not because so many
people were guillotined every day, but because the objects of his
own enmity were not among them. He was chagrined at the mis-
carriage of his scheme ; but the chagrin had its root in his desire for
order, and not in his humanity. A good man — say so imperfectly
good a man as Donton— could not have endured life after enacting
such a law and seeing the ghastly work that it was doing. He

ROBESPIEBBE.

35S

could hardly have contented himself with drawing tears from the
company in Madame Duplay’s little parlour by his pathetic recita-
tions from Gorneillo and Racine, or with listening to melting notes
from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by Robespierre’s
defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public Safet}”, as
soon as ho found out that he was powerless to arrest the daily
shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
Paris and ceased to be cognizant of the Committee’s deliberations.
The minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre
signed papers nearly every day of Messidor — (Jimo 19 to July 18)
the bloodstained month between Prairial and Thermidor — and was
thoroughly aware of the doings of the Committee. Ilis partisans
have now fallen back on the singular theory of what they style moral
absence. He was present in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit.
His frowning silence Avas a dcadKer rebuke to the slayers and oppres-
sors than secession. Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the
embarrassing fact of a merciful man standing silent before merciless
doings, there are at least two facts that show its* absurdity.

First, there is the affair of Catherine Theot. Catherine Theot was
a crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy
us herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouch-
safed to her Avas to the effect that Robespierre Avas a Messiah and
the new redeemer of the human race. The Committee of Greneral
Security rcsoh ed to indict this absurd sect. Vadier, — one of the
roughest of the men whom the insurrections of Paris had brought to
the front — ^rcj)ortcd on the charges to the Convention' (27 Prairial,
June 15), and he took tlio opportunity to make Robespierre look
profoundly ridiculous. The unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench,
gnawing his lips with bitter rage, while amid the sneers and laughter
of the Convention the officers brought to the bar the foolish creatures
Avho had called him the Son of God. His thin pride and prudish
self-respect were unutterably affronted, and ho quite understood that
the ridicule of the mysticism of Theot was an indirect pleasantry
upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the Committee of Public
Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the prosecution,
summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to let the
matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that there
was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed. Robes-
pierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
baflied, and the prosecution ended. “ Lutteur impuissant et fatigu^”
says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre,
upon this, ‘*il va se retirer, moralement du moins.” Impotent
and wearied! But he had just won a most signal ^victory for
good sense and humanity. Why was it the only oneP If

354

BOBESPIBRRE.

Bobespierre was able to save Th^ot, '^hy could he not save C^cile
Renault P

O^cile Renault was a young seamstress who was found ono
evening at the door of Robespierre’s lodging, calling out in a
state of exaltation that she would fain see what a tyrant looked
like. She was arrested, and upon her were found two little knives
used for the purposes of her trade. That she should be arrested and
imprisoned was natural enough. The times were charged with
deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had been mur-
dered in his own house. Only a few days before Cecile Renault’s
visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collet d’Herbois
on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play
the martyr as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens’
rusty pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a
faction ought not to be pushed too fai\ And it was a monstrous crime
that because Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial
victim at the Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing
not only the wretched Cecilc, but her father, her aunt, and one
of her brothers, all dispatched to the guillotine in the red shirt
of parricide, as agents of Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of
the father of the land. This was exactly two days after he had
sho^m his decisive power in the affair of the religious illuminists.
The only possible conclusion open to a plain man after weighing and
putting aside all the sophisms with which this afiair has been
obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case because its
further prosecution would have tended to make him ridiculous, and
he did not interfere in the other, because the more exaggerated, the
more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the more
interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.

The second fact bearing on Robespierre’s humanity is this.
He had encouraged the formation and stimulated the activity
of popular commissions who should provide victims for the 'revolu-
tionary tribunal. On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list
containing ono hundred and thirty-eight names was submitted for
the ratification of the Committee. The Committee endorsed the
bloody document, and the last signature of the endorsement is that
of the man who had resigned a post in his youth rather than be a
party to putting a man to death. As was obsor\'ed at the time,
Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his
colleagues, in order to take a part in a measure that was a sort of
complement to his Law of Prairial.

From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other,
we arc justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no
remorse* at the thought that it was his law which had unbound
the hands of the horrible genie of civil murder. His mind was

BOBESPIEBBE.

855

wholly absorbed in tbe calculations of a frigid egoism. His intel-
ligence, as we have always to remember, was very dim ; be only
aimed at one thing at once ; and that was seldom anything very
great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and obscured
vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the law of Frairial,
his designs — ^and they were meritorious and creditable designs enough
in themselves — had been directed against the corrupt chiefs such as
Tallien and Fouche, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and VouUand.
Hobespierre was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental
sympathy with the common people in the abstract, but his spiritual
pride, his pedantry, his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were
all wounded to the very quick by the kind of men whom the Revo-
lution had thrown to the surface. Governor Morris, then the
American minister, describes most of the members of the two
Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom it is a
stain to have any dealings ; as degraded men only worthy of the
profoundest contempt. Danton had said : Robespierre is the
least of a scoundrel of any of the band.” The Committee of
General Security represented the very elements by which Robes-
pierre was most revolted. They offended his respectability ; their
evil manners seemed to tarnish that good name which his vanity
hoped to make as revered all over Europe, as it already w'as among
his partisans in France. It was indispensable therefore to cut them
off from the revolutionary government, just as Hebert and as Danton
had been cut off. His colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend
themselves to this. Henceforth, with characteristically narrow
tenacity, he looked round for new combinations, but, so far as I
can see, with no broader design than to enable him to punish these
particular objects of his very just detestation.

The situation of sections and interests which ended in the Revo-
lution of Thermidor is one of the most extraordinarily intricate and
entirnglcd in the history of faction. It would take a volume to follow
out all the peripeteias of the drama. Here we can only enumerate
in a few sentences the parties to the contest and the conditions of the
game. The reader will easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre’s
way of making an effective combination. First, there were the two
Committees. Of these the one, the General Security, was thoroughly
hostile to Robespierre; its members, as we have said, were wild
and hardy spirits, with no political conception, and with a great
contempt for fine phrases and philosophical principles. They
knew Robespierre’s hatred for them, and they heartily returned it.
They were the steadfast centre of the changing schemes which
ended in his down&ll. The Committee of Public Safety was
divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot d’Herbois hated

VOL. XX. K.8. B B

366

ROBESPIEBBE.

Bobespierre, and Billaud had a sombre distrust of Bobespierre's
counsels. Shortly speaking, the object of the Billaudists was to
retain their power, and their power was always menaced from
two quarters, the Convention and Paris. If they let Bobespierre
have his own way against his enemies, would they not be at his
mercy whenever he chose to devise a popular insurrection against
them? Yet if they withstood Bobespierre, they could only do
so through the agency of the Convention, and to fall back
upon the Convention would be to give that body an express
invitation to resume the power that had in the pressure of the crisis
a year before been delegated to the Committee, and periodically
renewed afterwards. The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate,
and events afterwards proved that it was so. If we turn to the
Convention, we find the position equally distracting. They, too,
feared another insurrection, and a second decimation. If the Bight
helped Bobespierre to destroy the Pouches and Yadiers, he would
be stronger than ever; and what security had they against a
repetition of the violence of the Thirty-first of May? If the
Uantonists joined in destroying Bobespierre, they would be helping
the Bight, and what security had they against a Girondin reaction P
On the other hand, the Centre might fairly hope, just what Billaud
feared, that if the Committee came to the Convention to crush
Bobespierre, that would end in a combination strong enough to
enable the Convention to crush the Committees.

Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals
were the great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be
difficult to turn opinion against a triumphant administration. At the
first defeat,*' Bobespierre had said to Barcre, await you.” But
the defeat did not come. The plotting went on with incessant
activity; on one hand, Bobespierre, aided by Saint Just and
Couthon, strengthening himself at the Jacobin Club, and through
that among the sections ; on the other, the Mountain and the Com-
mittee of General Security trying to win over the Bight, more
contemptously christened the Marsh or the Belly of the Convention.
The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided how to act.

At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Bobespierre could
endure the tension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for
the struggle by riding, but with so little success that he was lifted
off his horse fainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent
pistol-practice. But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of
action. Saint Just urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men pro-
posed to carry off the members of the Committee bodily from Iheir
midnight deliberations. Bobespierre declined, and fell bock on what
he took to be his greatest strength and most unfailing resource ; he
prepared* a speech. On the Eighth of Thermidor he delivered it to
the Convention, amid intense excitement both within its walls and

BOBESPIEHRE. 357

without. All Paris knew that they were now on the eve of one more
of the famous Days ; the revolution of Thermidor had begun.

The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all
parties since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Bobespierre
had been a statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear
course. He ought to have taken the line of argument that Danton
would have taken. That is to say, he ought to have identified him-
self fully with the interests and security of the Convention ; to have
accepted the growing resolution to close the Terror ; to have
boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee of General Security,
and the removal from the Committee of Public Safety of Billaud,
CoUot, Barere ; to have proposed to send about fifty persons to
Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with the
foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest
of the position. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the
best possible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial
was a Terrorist on principle. Andin truth we know that Bobespierre
had no definite intention of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not
mental strength enough to throw off the profound apprehension
which the incessant alarms of the last five years had engendered in
him ; and the only device, that he could imagine for maintaining the
republic against traitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the revo-
lutionary tribunal.

If, however, Bobespierre lacked the grasp which might have
made him tlic representative of a broad and stable policy, it was at
least his interest to persuade the men of the Plain that he enter-
tained no designs against them. And this is what in his own mind
he intended. But in order to do it effectively, it was clearly best to
tell his hearers in so many words whom he wished them to strike.
That would have relieved the majority, and banished the suspicion
which had been busily fomented by his enemies, that he had in his
pocket a long list of tlieir names for proscription. But Bobespierre,
having for the first time in his life ventured on aggressive action
without the support of a definite party, faltered. He dared not to
designate his enemies face to face and by name. Instead of that,
he talked vaguely of conspirators against the republic and calum-
niators of himself. There was not a single bold, definite, unmis-
takable sentence in the speech from first to last. The men of the
Plain were insecure and doubtful; they had no certainty that
among conspirators and calumniators he did not include too many
of themselves. People are not so readily seized by grand
phrases, when their heads are at stake. The sitting was long,
and marked by changing currents and reverses. When they
broke up, all was left uncertain. Bobespierre had suffered a
check. Billaud felt that he could no longer hesitate in joining the

B B 2

358

BOBESPIEBBE.

combination against his colleague. Each party was aware that the
next day must seal the fate of one or other of them. There is a
legend that in the evening Eobespierre walked in the Champs Elys^cs
with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by his faithful dog, Brount.
They admired the purple of the sunset, and talked of the prospect
of a glorious to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The evening
was passed in no lover’s saunterings, but amid the storm and uproar
of the Club. He went to the Jacobins to read over again his speech
of the day. '^It is my testament of death,” ho said, amid the
passionate protestations of his devoted followers. He had been
talking for the last three years of his willingness to drink the
hemlock and to offer his breast to the poniards of tyrants. That
was a fashion of the speech of the time, and in earlier days it had been
more than a fashion of speech, for Brunswick would have given them
short shrift. But now, when he talked of his last testament, Eobes-
pierre did not intend it to be so if he could prevent it. When he
went to rest that night, he had a tolerably calm hope that he should
win the next day’s battle in the Convention, when he was aware
that Saint Just would attack the Committees openly and directly.
If he would have allowed his band to invade the Pavilion do Flore,
and carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through the night,
the battle would have been won when he awoke. His friends are
justified in saying that his strong respect for legality was the cause
of his ruin.

Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness for connecting
awful events in their lives with portents and signs among the outer
elements. It was noticed that the heat during the terrible days of
Theimidor was more intense than had been known within the
memory of man. The thermometer never fell below sixty-five
degrees in the coolest part of the night, and in the day time men
and women and beasts of burden fell down dead in the streets^ By
five o’clock in the morning of the Ninth Thermidor, the galleries of
the Convention were filled by a boisterous and excited throng. At
ten o’clock the proceedings began as usual with the reading of corre-
spondence from the departments and from the armies. Eobespierre
who had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual body of
admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, remained standing by
the side of the tribune. It is a familiar fact that moments of
appalling suspense are precisely those in which we are most ready
involuntarily to note a trifle ; everybody observed that Eobespierre
wore the coat of violet-blue silk and the white nankeens in wUch a
few weeks previously he had done honour to the Supreme Being.

The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The men of the Plain
and the Marsh had lost the abject mien with which they usually
cowered before Eobespierre’s glance ; they wore a courageous air of

BOBESPIBBEE.

369

judicial reserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered restlesdy
to and fro among the corridors. At noon TaUien saw that Saint Just
had ascended the tribune. Instantly he rushed down into the chamber,
knowing that the battle had now begun in fierce earnest. Saint
Just had not got through two sentences, before TaUien interrupted
him. He began to insist with energy that there should be an end
to the equivocal phrases with which Paris had been too long alarmed
by the Triumvirate. BUlaud, fearing to be outdone in the attack,
hastily forced his way to the tribune, broke into what TaUien was
saying, and proceeded dexterously to discredit Eobespicrre’s allies
without at once assailing Robespierre himself. Le Bas ran in a fury
to stop him ; Oollot d’Herbois, the president, declared Le Bas out of
order ; the hall rang with cries of To prison ! To the Abbey ! ”
and Le Bas was driven from the tribune. This was the beginning
of the tempest. Robespierre’s enemies knew that they were fighting
for their lives, and this inspired them with a strong and resolute
power that is always impressive in popular assemblies. lie stiU
thought himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations. Robes-
pierre, at last, unable to control himself, scaled the tribune. There
suddenly burst forth from TaUien and his partisans vehement shouts
of “ Down with the tyrant, down with the tyrant ! ” The gaUeries
were swept by a mid frenzy of vague agitation ; the president’s bell
poured loud incessant clanging into the tumult ; the men of the Plain
held themselves firm and silent ; in the tribune raged ferocious groups,
TaUien menacing Robespierre wdth a dagger, Billaud roaring out
proposals to arrest this person and that, Robespierre gesticulating,
threatening, yelling, shrieking. Ilis enemies knew that if he were
once oUowed to got a hearing, his authority might even yet overawe
the waverers. A penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose
the day. The majority of the chamber stiU hesitated. They caUed
for Barere, in whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side
they had the confidence of long experience. Robespierre, recovering
some of his calm and perceiving now that he had really to deal with
a serious revolt, again asked to bo heard before Barere. But the
cries for Barere were louder than ever. Barere spoke, in a sense
hostile to Robespierre, but warily and without naming him.

Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was uncertain.
The battle might even now turn either w'ay. Robespierre
made another attempt to speak, but TaUien with intrepid
fury broke out into a torrent of louder and more vehement
invective. Robespierre’s shrill voice was heard in disjected
snatches, amidst the violent tones of TaUien, the yeUs of
the president calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging
of the bell. Then came that supreme hour of the struggle, whose
tale has been so often told, when Robespierre turned from his old
aUies of the Mountain, and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to

m

BOBBSPIEBBE.

the probity and virtue of tbe Bigbt and the Plain. To his horror,
even these despised men, after a slight movement, remained mute.
Then his cheeks blanched, and the sweat ran down his face. But
anger and scornful impatience swiftly came back and restored him.
President of oBsasmis^ he cried out to Thuriot, for the last time I ask
to be heard. Thou canst not speak, called one, the blood of Danton
chokes thee. He flung himself down the steps of the tribune, and
rushed towards the benches of the Bight. Come no further, cried
another, Vergniaud and Condorcet sat here. He regained the tribune,
but his speech was gone. He was reduced to the dregs of an
impotent and gasping voiceless gesticulation, like the strife of
one in a nightmare.

The day was lost. The tension of a passionate and violent
struggle prolonged for many hours always at length exasperates
onlookers with something of the brute ferocity of the actors. The
physical strain stirs the tiger in the blood ; they conceive a cruel
hatred against weakness, just as the heated throng of a Boman
amphitheatre turned up their thumbs for the instant dispatch
of the unfortunate swordsman who was too ready to lower
his arms. The Bight, the Plain, even the galleries, despised
the man who had succumbed. If Bobespierre had possessed the
physical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor
would have been another of his victories. He was crushed by the
relentless ferocity and endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his
arrest was resolved upon by acclamation. Ho cast a glance at the
galleries, as marvelling that they should remain passive in face of an
outrage on his person. They were mute. The ushers advanced with
hesitation todotheir duty,and not without trembling carriedhimaway,
along with Couthon and Saint dust. The brother, for whom he had
made honourable sacrifices in days that seemed to be divided from
the present by an abyss of centuries, insisted with fine heroism on
sharing his fate, and Augustin Bobespierre and Lc Bas were led off
to the prisons along with their leader and idol.

It was now a little after four o^clock. The Convention with
the self-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on
with formal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For
life, as the poets tell, is a daily stage-play ; men declaim their high
heroic parts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint
from their checks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals,
as they ate their dinners were unconscious apparently that the great
crisis of the drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were
to witness the climax. Bobespierre had been crushed by the Con-
vention ; it remained to be seen whether the Convention would not
now be crushed by the Commune of Paris.

Bobespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg.
The gaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. The

BOBBSPZEBBE.

861

terrible prisoner was next taken to the Muriel where he remained
among joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Mean-
while &e old insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of
Aug^stin^92|Of May andof Junein ’93, were again followed. Thebeat-
ing of the rappel and the g^niraU was heard in all the sections, and the
tocsin sounded its dreadM note, reminding all who should hear it that
insurrection is the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties,
llanriot, the commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the
evening, but he was speedily released by the agents of theOommune.
The Council issued manifestoes and decrees from the Common Mall
every moment. The barriers were closed. Cannon were posted
opposite the doors of the hall of the Convention. The quays were
thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro between the Jaeobin Club and
the Common Hall, and between these two centres and each of the
forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
of this delirious night that Hanriot did not at once use the
force at his command to break up the Convention. There is
no obvious reason why he should not have done so. The members
of the Convention had re-assembled after their dinner, towards
seven o’clock. The hall which had resounded with the shrieks and
yells of the furious gladiators of the factions all day, now lent a
lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which one member after another
delivered from the shadow of the tribune. Towards nine o’clock
the members of the two dread Committees came in panic to seek
shelter among their colleagues, as dejected in their peril,” says an
eyewitness, “ as they had been cruel and insolent in the hour of
their supremacy.” When they heard that Hanriot had been released,
and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for lost
and mode ready for death. Kews came that Hobespierre had broken
his arrest, and gone to the Common Hall. Hobespierre, after urgent
and repeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hour
before midnight to leave the Maine and join his partisans of the
Commune. This vras an act of revolt against the Convention, for
the Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was
there he was within the law. The Convention, with heroic
intrepidity, declared both Hanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale
of the law. This prompt measure was their salvation. ’Twelve
members were instantly named to carry the decree to all the sections.
With the scarf of office round their waists, and a Bahrein hand, they
sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escorted by attendants with
flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all good citizens to the
succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the street comers
with power and authority, and striking the imaginations of men. At
midnight heavy rain began to fall.

The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that
victory was sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper

BOmiSPIEBKQ.

decrees, to each of whch the Conyention replied by a counter-decree.
Those who have studied the situation most minutely are of opinion
that even so late as one o’clock in the morning, the Commune might
have made a successful defence, although it had lost the opportunity
which it had certainly possessed up to ten o’clock of destroying
the Convention. But on this occasion the genius of insurrection
slumbered. And there was a genuine division of opinion in the
eastern quarters of Paris, the result of a grim distrust of the man who
had helped to slay Hebert and Chaumette. At a word this distrust
began to declare itself. The opinion of the sections became more and
more distracted. One armed group cried, Doicn mth the Convention !
Another armed group cried The Convention for every and down mth
the Commune ! The two great faubourgs were all astir, and throe
battalions wore ready to march. Emissaries from the Convention
actually succeeded in persuading them — such the dementia of the
night— that Bobespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Com-
mune were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the
Temjjle. One body of communist partisans after another was
detached from its allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place
de Greve, and when companies came up from the sections in
obedience to orders from Hanriot and the Commune, the silence
made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew towards the great
metropolitan church or elsewhere.

Barras, whom the Convention had charged witli its military defence,
gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of
a man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of ’89, ho
foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He
arranged his forces into tvro divisions. One of them marched along
the quays to take the Common Hall in front ; the other along the
Rue Saint Honore to take it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the
staircases and corridors were alive with bustling messengers, and
those mysterious busybodies who arc always found lingering vrithout
a purpose on the skirts of great historic scenes. Robespierre and
the other chiefs were in a small room preparing manifestoes and
signing decrees. They were curiously unaware of the movements of
the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of authority
upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces
would be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road west-
wards. It was now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed tho
first two letters of his name to a document before him, when he was
startled by cries and uproar in the Place below. In a few instants
he lay stretched on the ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot.
His brother had either fallen or had leaped out of the window.
Oouthon was hurled over a staircase and lay for dead. Saint Just
was a prisoner.

KOBESPIEHBE.

363

Whether Robespieire was shot hy an officer of the Gonyentional
force, or attempted to blow out his own brains we shall never know,
any more than we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his
spiritual master, came to an end. The wounded man was carried, a
ghastly sight, first to the Committee of Public Safety, and then to
the Conciergcrie, where ho lay in silent stupefaction through the
heat of the summer day. As he was an outlaw, the only legal pre-
liminary before his execution was to identify him. At five in the
afternoon, he was raised into the cart ; Couthon and the younger
Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom of it;
Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed the
band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge,
along the Rue Saint Honor^ into the Rue Royale, and so to the
Luxor column, retraces the ria dolorom of the Revolution on the
afternoon of Tenth of Thermidor.

The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the Revolution of
Thermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. The
insurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, First
Prairial, and Thirteenth Vendemiaire, all ended in the victory of the
Convention over the old revolutionary forces of Paris. The Com-
mittees, on the other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had
ruined themselves. Very gradually the movement towards order,
which had begun in the mind of Danton, and had gone on in the
cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became definite. But it was in the
interest of very different ideas from those of either Danton or of
Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the Red Terror. It was
not until nine months after the death of Robespierre that the reaction
was strong enough to smite his colleagues of the two Committees.
The surviving Girondins had come back to their seats in the Conven-
tion ; the Duntonians had not forgiven the execution of their chief.
These two parties were bent on vengeance. In April, 1795, a decree
was passed banishing Billaud de Yarennes, Collot d’Herbois, and
Barere. In tho following month the leaders of the Committee of
General Security were thrown into prison. The revolution had
passed into new currents. Wo cannot see any reasons for thinking
that those currents would have led to any happier results if Robes-
pierre had won the battle. Tallien, Fouche, Barras, and the rest
were thoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre
for building up a state? He had neither strength of practical
character, nor firm breadth of political judgment, nor a sound social
doctrine. When we compare him, I do not say with Frederick of
Prussia, with Jefferson, with Washington, but with tho group of able
men who made the closing year of the Convention honourable and of
good service to France, we have a measure of Robespierre^s profound
and pitiable incoiiipetence. Editor.

THE mSH DOMESDAY BOOK.

The return of owners of land in Ireland, whicli has lately been
prepared by the Gh)vemment, is in many respects a faulty document.
To be of real yalue, it ought to be easy to comp^ with the returns
of the same kind which We been compiled for England and Scot-
land ; it ought to be a bond, fide account of owners of land in a real
sense, excluding property of a different class ; and it ought to point
to most of the facts, at least, which can fairly he said to relate to the
subject. In eyery one of these matters, howeycr, tho Irish Domes-
day Book, as it is commonly called, is open to yery graye exceptions ;
and as a cadastral suryey of tho land of Ireland it must be deemed
imperfect, and eyen dcceptiyc. For instance, unlike its English and
Scotch counterparts, it makes a wholly inadequate rating, and not
eyen the approximate rental, the standard of the yalue of Irish land ;
and it eyidently estimates the wastes of Ireland, which are put down
at 151,000 acres only, quite differently from the English return, in
which “commons and waste lands” appear to coyer an area ten
times as large. Then again — ^following in this respect the bad pre-
cedent set for this country, with a political object easy to detect —
this return identifies “ houses” with “ lands,” and places the owners
of both in the same list, the result being to represent the number of
Irish landowners, who descrye the name, as infinitely greater than it
really is (there is a like fallacy in the cases of England and Scot-
land), and to mystify and perplex the whole question. Lastly, in
this, as in the English and Scotch returns, no attempt has been made
to ascertain the amount of charges affecting landed property. The
merely nominal and the absolute owners of estates seem to haye
equal interests ; no notice, morooyer, has been taken of terms less
than ninety-nine years ; and these omissions are extremely serious.
For all these reasons it is not possible to speak highly of this per-
formance, and something better, we hope, will ere long replace it.
Neyertheless the return, such as it is, deseryes attention as a first
effort to deal thoroughly with an important subject ; and a careful
reyiew of it will perhaps throw light on the cWacteristics of the
land system of Ireland, and on yarious problems suggested by it.

The most striking feature of the Domesday Book is at first sight
the extreme fewness of Irish as compared with English landowners,
inference being that the people of Ireland haye no lasting hold
on their natiye soil, in a degree unknown in the larger country.
The metropolis apart, the owners of land in England and Wales are
said to be more in number than 972,000, on an area of 33,000,000

THE IBIBH HOHESDAT BOOK.

365

acres, the population being 19,458,000 — ^that is, 1 in 20 of the inha-
bitants of England and Wales can call a fraction of the land their
own. In Ireland, however, the owners of land are only 68,758,
with an area of more than 20,000,000 acres, and a population of
5,409,000 — ^that is, 1 in 80 Irishmen only have the “ stake in the
country ” of landed property. N^evertheless, owing to the confusing
influence of a disturbing element in these returns, this computation
is misleading ; and a fairer account of the matter shows that the
contrast is not so marked as it seems at first. If we exclude, as we
clearly ought, from the estimate mere house tenements in both
countries, the real owners of land in England and Wales would be
perhaps not more than 300,000 persons, against 40,000 of the same
class in Ireland — that is, compared with the whole population, the
number of the English and Welsh landowners would be only as 1 to
64, while in Ireland it would be 1 in 130, a proportion very difierent
from that just referred to.^ Nevertheless, even if we reckon' thus,
the owners of land in England and Wales will be, relatively to the
same class in Ireland, in a ratio of more than 2 to 1 ; and no doubt
can exist, after making every allowance that can be fairly made, that
the ownership of the soil is more restricted in Ireland than in the
rest of these kingdoms.

The next point to notice in this return is the size of Irish estates
as compared wuth English, and the deficiency of small landowners in
Ireland. We have satisfied ourselves that 63 proprietors have more
than a fifth of the soil of Leinster, 67 about a fourth of Munster,
90 a good deal more than a third of Ulster, 54 about this large
share of Connaught. In fact, of the 20,159,000 acres which make
up the entire area of Ireland, not less than 5,806,000 are possessed
by 274 owners — that is, not far from a third of the whole island is
in the hands of a few score of people who form but a fraction even
of their own order. Great as is the extent of estates in England,
broad as are the manors of such nobles as the Duke of Northumber-
land and the Duke of Devonshire, and of many other large-acred
men, they show nothing like these results ; and we venture to say
that any such proportion between large properties and the rest of
the soil docs not exist in Britain south of the Tweed. As for the
want in Ireland of small landowners — that is, of persons possessing
estates of from 100 to 800 acres — it is evident on the face of the
return ; and though we have not attempted an exact comparison,
the corresponding class, t here can be no doubt, is many times more
numerous in this country.

These considerations no doubt show that landed property is dis-
tributed less favourably in Ireland than it is in England, with

(1) These figures are, and must be, to a great extent conjeoturol ; but we have taken
some pains to approach at least the truth.

866

THE IBISH DOMESDAY BODE.

reference to the community at large ; its economic settlement is less
safe and national. It is not, however, we are convinced, to these
facts that we should mainly ascribe the phenomena of the land
system of Ireland, which even at this moment are so distressing —
the discontent which is still too often seen in the relations of land-
lord and tenant, the agitation which has outlived the Land Act.

Except in a few not important points, the land system of Scotland
does not provoke demands for reform or change ; it accommodates
itself sufficiently well to the wants and wishes of all classes ; it is in
disaccord with no popular sympathies. Yet, economically, the land
system of Scotland, as the returns for that country clearlj" prove,
presents the identical characteristics to which we have called atten-
tion as regards Ireland, and which might be supposed to give the
Irish land system its peculiar character. The owners of land in
Scotland are few. If indeed we take houses into account, they
appear to be 1 in 25, compared with the population of 3,359,000 ;
but if we exclude this class of property, they are not more than
1 in 105, those in Ireland being 1 in 130 ; and it is impossible to
.suppose that this small difference could bo productive of great
effects. Then, too, Scotland is, in a special way, a country of vast
territorial domains ; 150 persons, it has been alleged, possess fully a
third of her soil ; and when we remember the immense estates of
the Dukes of Sutherland, Bucclcuch, and Athol, of Mr. Matheson,
and many other magnates, we must admit ihat, in this mutter of
large properties, she resembles Ireland. The number of small land-
owners, too, though greater in Scotland than in Ireland, is never-
theless by no means largo ; and if we compare both with the same
class in England, the difference ceases to have much significance.
On the whole, therefore, wo find in Scotland what at first sight we
might fairly consider the distinctive marks of the Irish land system,
and yet we know that the land presents very different problems in
the two countries.

TVliile wc are far from saying that economic causes do not largely
affect the land question of Ireland, the peculiarities of her land
system, and the popular feelings connected with it, are, wc believe,
in the main, to be traced to circumstances of a wholly different kind.
If we examine the returns for England and Wales, we find that the
land discloses everywhere signs of ancient, peaceful, and contented
settlement ; that its organization is old and felicitous. In all parts,
indeed, of that broad area, new wealth is continually gathering to the
soil ; the successful trader, the opulent lawyer, men who have become
rich in every walk of industry, are now, as they have been for
centuries, elbowing out an impoverished class of landowners ; and
considerable tracts are, year after year, passing into the hands of
a fresh race of proprietors. But in every county of England and

THE IRISH BOHESDAY.BOOE,

867

Wales the land is still held, to a great extent, by well-known families
of long descent ; and, what is more important, they still form a
preponderating element in territorial life. Glance at the English
returns, and you still see the names of Percy and Grey, of Lowther
and Howard, predominant in the region north of the Humber ; the
Manners are supreme in Leicestershire ; in Devon the historic
house of Courtenay is surrounded by a host of distinguished satellites —
Carews, Fortescues, Frideaux’s, and others ; Cornwall has still her
Bassets, her Itobartcs, her Tremayncs ; the Thynnes are the social
chiefs of Wilts ; in Dorset, the Bankes, the Pleydells, the Bivers, are
eminent among the local magnates. As for Wales, the descendants
of her Celtic princes aro still lords of immense domains ; out of a
whole legion of inferior potentates, we need refer only to the race
of “ Sir Watkin,” and to the Morgans, for ages chiefs of Tredegar.
Nor is the case very different even in the districts where the old
aristocracy, as might have been supposed, would have been almost
thrust out or supplanted. In Kent, in Surrey, even in Middlesex,
considerable estates are still possessed by proprietors of far-descended
lineage; the Stanleys, the Townleys, the Gerards, and others are
still the loading noblesse of Lancashire ; the Calthorpes, the
Dudleys, and many more arc conspicuous in the black country ; the
Somersets and Berkeleys are great names in the opulent tracts that
spread around Bristol. The influence, too, of these ruling houses
has been enormous, wherever they exist ; they have given, as
it were, its form and mould to the settlement of the land around
them ; they have made the now elements which centre in the soil
to accommodate themselves in a great measure to the old conditions of
landed society. Nor can it be said that in England and Wales the
organic structure of landed relations has been rudely broken, or
even shaken ; it has suffered little from civil discord ; confiscation
has made few changes in it; and it has continued for ages in a
state of repose, hardly at all disturbed by external events, and only
modifying itself with the growth of the nation. The same remarks,
in a great degree, apply to the land system of Scotland, as we see
it in the returns for that country. The successors of her old high-
land chieftains still retain enormous tracts of the soil ; the families
of her first lowland settlers overshadow the land to the south of the
Grampians ; the heads of her ancient Norse colonists are dominant
in Caithness and the Orkneys ; the Macleods and Macdonalds, the
Campbells and Scotts, the Hays, Herrs, Gordons, and other names
of the kind, aro still those of her great landowners. In Scotland,
too, notwithstanding Culloden and the civil wars of the seventeenth
century, the organization of the land was not broken up; and
though instances of confiscation were frequent enough, there was
no general subversion of proprietary rights; whole tracts of the

d68

THE IBI6H DOMESDAY BOOM.

country were not kept in a continual state of change of ownership ;
and reiterated dispossession on an immense scale was unknown.

Let us now contrast with the state of things which we find in
England, in Wales, and in Scotland, the existing settlement of land
in Ireland. Three centuries ago her Celtic chieftains were owners
of probably five-sixths of the soil ; and, even down to the time of
Cromwell, the possessions they held were stiU vast. The names,
however, of the descendants of these men, as we see clearly from the
Domesday Book, appear scarcely in any part of Ireland among
proprietors of large estates ; and for the most part they have
whoUy vanished from what were once their ancestral domains. The
only landowners of Irish descent who retain, in any sense, a consider-
able part of the immense tracts their forefathers ruled, seem to be,
in Leinster, Lord Castletown and Mr. Eavanagh, and in Ulster,
Lord O’lfeill and a few others ; and though, in Munster and Con-
naught, the number is greater — O’Briens, O’Connors, 0’E.eillys,
O’Haras, O’Loghlens, Macnamaras, and the like — ^it is not more
than from ten to twenty persons. Even more significant is the
absence of names which stand out on old Irish maps as dominant
over entire counties. Setting aside hundreds of inferior chiefs, you
cannot now find the O’Moores of Leix, the Maguires of Fermanagh,
the O’Donnells of the north ; and the principalities of McArthy
More, of O’Sullivan Bearc, of O’Connor of O’Faly, have passed into
the hands of other lords.

Nor has fortune been mucli more propitious to the great Norman
houses which for four centuries held sway through the shifting bounds
of the Pale. The Geraldines, indeed, still own broad lands in
Kildare ; the castle of the Butlers still overlooks tho streets of their
feudal town of Kilkenny ; the Plunketts flourish in Meath and Louth ;
the St. Lawrences, Prestons, Barnwclls, and Talbots hold tracts
in the plain that surrounds Dublin. • But the burning pine of the
Desmonds has been long extinct ; the vast lordships of the Taaffj^s and
the Eustaces, of the Flemings and Graces, the Fitz-Stephens and
Walidies, know no more the presence of their ancient nobles; in
many counties the old Norman names are to be found only in the
ranks of tho peasantry. Thus the settlement of the land in Ireland
is, to that of the rest of Britain, but a thing of yester^y ; and
even, now two- thirds of the country probably belong to the
descendants of Elizabethan rovers, of adventurers and soldiers of
Cromwell and William, of Dutch and French refugees, and of
Scottish colonists. Nor is even this the most striking feature of a
most remarkable plan of landed ownership. The settlement of
property in land in Ireland is founded on conquests and confiscations,
recurring over and over again, and generally marked by extreme
iriolence ; it was propped up by inhuman laws, which perpetuated the

THE IBISH BOSOESDlAT BOOK.

369

strife of race and faith, and drew an almost impassable line between
the owner and the occupier of the soil; it promoted absenteeism on
a gigantic scale ; it tended, over the greater part of the island, to
make the Irish landlord an alien master, and the Irish peasant a
degraded serf. The state of things, too, which had been thus
established, continued, it must be borne in mind, with scarcely a
sign of real unprovement, to a period almost within Uving memory ;
and even now, largely as it has been modified by time, opinion, and
changed manners, and by earnest efforts of legislation, its traces are
still to be seen everywhere. And here it must be added that one
great attempt, made in our own day, to transform the ownership of
land in Ireland on an extensive scale, cannot be said to have been
very fortunate. The operation of the Incumbered Estates’ Acts has
transferred millions of acres of the soil of Ireland ; but the new
proprietary, as a general rule, have been a harsh and exacting class,
and have not placed the organization of the land in any perceptible
degree on a better footing.

It is to these differences in the settlement of the land, far more
than to economic causes, that we must chiefly ascribe the distinction
between Ireland and the rest of Britain in this respect — ^that we must
trace the form of the Irish land system, and the train of sentiments
that is connected with it. There is a great deal that is strange and
anomalous in the relations of landlord and tenant in England ; and
d priori there is much to condemn in the existing conditions of
English tenures. But the structure of English landed society is
ancient, and, for the most part, sound ; it is sustained by noble and
kindly traditions ; it is cemented by long and peaceful usage ; it
knits the owners and occupiers of the soil together in a union
that shows no signs of breaking. A Land Act that is little more
than a sham has sufficed to satisfy the English farmer ; and he stiU
follows his superior to the poll with the fidelity of a feudal
retainer. The characteristics of landed relations arc, in a great
measure, the same in Scotland; and though the Scotch tenantry
think more for themselves, and are more independent than their
southern fellows, they feel the profoundest reverence for the lords of
the soil. In Ireland all this is very different ; and the mode in
which the land was obtained and settled is the clear and paramount
cause of the difference. In a part of Ulster, indeed, where a race of
colonists were associated in the closest dependence as owners and
occupiers of the same districts, and where a provision was made for
the conquered race, the land system is in a healthy state ; friendly
ties bind the landed classes together ; there is little ill-will in landed
relations ; and customs, deep-rooted and strongly developed, connect
the whole form of landed society. But everywhere else the land
system of Ireland bears the marks of its pecuUar origin, of the

870

THE IBI8H DOMESDAY BOOK.

antecedents from which it sprung. Were there nothing else, the
owners of the soil in Ireland, with a title that, as a general rule,
does not extend beyond two centuries, could not expect to command
the respect that belongs to an ancient class of proprietors, to gather
around them the happy traditions that grow out of long and prescrip-
tive possession. But if it bo recollected that the mass of Irish land was
violently tom from its old inheritors, and was, for generations,
tossed from one hand to another ; that the defendants of the dis-
possessed owners were reduced to a state almost of villainage ; that
nothing was left undone for years to uphold this crude arrangement
of repeated conquests ; that populations of diseordant faiths, who
dwelt together within the same borders, were kept separated into
hostile castes ; and, finally, that Irish landed property was deserted
by those who reaped its fruits, and deprived of the assoeiations that
make it gracious, to an extent unknown in the sister island — we
shall understand the kind of relations that would be formed out of
such an order of things, and should cease to wonder that, even at this
day, the land is a source of trouble in Irish politics. Notwithstand-
ing all that has been done to remove the evil effects of the past, a
line of distinction, easy to trace, still keeps the landed classes in a
great measure apart, in three, at least, of the Irish provinces ; the
landlords regard themselves as of a different order and of a difierent
interest from their dependants ; the peasantry cherish memories of
ancient wrong, and look with suspicion on their superiors ; and in
spite of innumerable well-meant efforts, the social chasm is not com-
pletely closed. In this condition of affairs the relations that belong
to the land are even now not in a vrholesome state ; kindly usages
do not spring up from the soil ; and owners and occupiers, considered
as a whole, are not united by genuine sympathy. The evidence of
this is not doubtful ; scarcely a representative of landed property sits
in the House of Commons for Ireland, south of the Boyne ; and an
agitation has sprung up for what, under specious disguises and
names, is really a new confiscation of the Irish land.

From what we havo said it will be seen how unjust it would be to
lay the blame of this still infelicitous state of things on any class or
persons of this generation. It is easy to censure agitators and
priests,’* “ oppressive landlords ” and “grasping tenants,** “indif-
ferent politicians” and “mere economists;’* but the Irish land
system, as a matter of fact, is the growth of an unfortunate past ;
and almost all that is unlovely in it belongs to the distant domain of
history. A more useful inquiry is whether anything can be still
effected, as regards the subject, to mitigate or efface existing evils,
and to place landed relations in Ireland, as far as may be, on a more
stable basis. I, for one, must utter a distinct protest against the
schemes *df “ general tenant right,” of “ fixity of tenure,” and of
'V fixed rents,” put forward by a well-known party as panaceas in

THE IBISH DOMESDAY BOOK.

371

this matter. However plausibly they may be disguised, however
their authors may hide it from themselves, they really mean a
transfer of the soil from its present owners to the occupying tenants,
without compensation even nearly adequate. Projects of this kind
are simply unjust ; they would necessarily lead to wrong and con-
fusion — to the mischiefs, in short, of a scramble for property ; and
in the interest of a still distracted nation, which has already suffered
so much from violent changes in the tenure of land, they ought, I
think, to be firmly opposed. There is less objection to the plan of
Mr. Mill for the expropriation of the owners of land in Ireland, and
the acquisition of their estates by the State, with a view to a new
distribution of them ; but I doubt the expediency of such a measure,
though it certainly cannot be pronounced unfair, and probably it
would never command the assent of Parliament. Nor can I, in any
sense, subscribe to the doctrine which in some quarters has received
support — that the Irish Land Act ought to be so administered as
indirectly to accomplish objects beyond its real and avowed purpose ;
that landlords in Ireland ought to be subjected to burdens so onerous
and oppressive as practically to take their property from them, or to
convert it into a mere rent-charge wholly different from proprietary
rights. Such ideas appear to me odious ; and, on the whole, I cannot
seriously doubt that, for the general good of Ireland herself, the
settlement of the land as it exists at present, un/ortunate as it is in
many respects from its historical associations and other causes, must
bo honestly defended against all plans of spoliation, avowed or
concealed. It is, however, a very different question whether, con-
sistently with this as a fixed principle, legislation may not to somo
extent effect improvement in Irish tenures, and make the land
system of Ireland better. Taking our stand on the Land Act of
Mr. Gladstone, it is surely but right that, in whatever degree it
has been evaded or rendered useless by devices contrary to its true
import, it ought to be supplemented by just amendments ; and the
security of possession and other rights which it guaranteed to the
occupier of the soil in Ireland, ought to be assured to him beyond
dispute. Somo reform is certainly needed here ; it would be attended
with good results ; and if it would not satisfy wild demands, it vrould
remove some grounds of discontent, at least, within the reach of
remedial law. In addition to this, a real effort in another direc-
tion ought to be made to effect a change obviously of true policy.
Historical and economic facts point to the expediency of increasing
the number of small landowners in Ireland by any means that can
be deemed legitimate ; and it would be desirable that the> occupiers
of the Irish soil should be generally enabled to buy their holdings,
and thus to acquire largely a permanent title to the land, not by
confiscation but fair purchase. No doubt can exist that this can be
accomplished : money is not wanting on the p&rt of the tenant, nor
VOL. XX. N.8. c c

m

THE lEISH DOMESDAY BOOK,

readiness to sell on the part of landlords ; and the principle of the
scheme^ as is well known, holds a prominent place in the Irish Land
Act. The machinery, however, at present arranged to effect the
transfer will hardly work ; and a reform in this respect deserves the
attention of those who really wish well to Ireland. The solution of
the problem will bo probably found in the extension of the powers
of local tribunals, and the establishment of local registries of rights
to land — ^all steps in that process of freeing the soil,'" and ren-
dering its alienation simple and easy, which is one of the chief
questions of a not distant future.

For the rest we must largely trust in time and in tho influence of
just government, to remove the blots of the Irish land system ; and
this trust is certainly not illusory. No doubt, apart from some
general causes, special circumstances have tended of late to revive
what has been expressively called the “ Irish land war ; " and there
are those who assert that landed ^lations in Ireland are as disturbed
as ever. The Land Act has raised extravagunt hopes in a population
long sorely tried, and not accustomed to reason or think ; a few Irish
landlords have provoked ill-will, and even caused a great deal of
alarm, by attempts to elude the effects of that measure ; the progress
of Ireland in material wealth has led to a rise of rents, and disputes
on the subject. These, however, are merely passing troubles ; some
may be dealt with by legislation ; and most of them ought to be
smoothed away by the searching machinery of the Land Act, intelli-
gently applied with an even hand. If wo steadily look over broad
tracts of time, we see that all that wns most evil and perilous in tho
land system of Ireland has been gradually becoming a thing of the
past ; that everything connected with the Irish soil exhibits plain
signs of decided improvement. There is still too little sympathy
between the landed classes in most parts of the country ; but the
Irish landlords and tenants of the present day are associated in a
very different way from what they were in the time of Arthur
Young, when the first were tyrants and the others slaves. The
relation of owner and occupier in the Irish soil is even now not all we
could wish it to bo ; but the rack-renting squires of Miss Edgeworth's
tales, the grasping middlemen of half a century ago, the millions of
a down-trodden peasantry who struggled for existence on a preca-
rious root, have been replaced by a happier order of things. In other
respects landed relations in Ireland are in a healthier state than they
formerly were ; the evils of absenteeism have been greatly reduced ;
the management of estates and farms has made a rapid advance ;
above all the terrible agrarian crimes — active symptoms of the
hatred and passion that marred the structure of Irish life — have
iinrfiens Ay diminished, if they have not disappeared. These gratify-
ing changes have been the result of the work of years, and of the
complete reform, which has taken place in the present age, in the

THE IRISH DOMESDAY BOOK.

373

government and administration of Ireland ; and there can be no
doubt that the same effects will continue to follow the same causes.
On the whole^ though it is still impossible to pronounce the Irish
land system sound, or in a really satisfactory state, it has certainly
thrown^off its worst ills ; and we may hope that the time is not
distant when it will cease to alarm and perplex statesmen, and will
be in accord with national feelings. To attain that consummation, I,
for one, look with confidence to the good sense and right feeling of
many Irish landlords ; no class, probably, in the British Empire has
improved so markedly during the last fifty years ; no class has been
more severely subjected to a jealous and exacting public opinion ;
no class seems to bo more impressed with the difiiculties of a position
for which its present representatives arc not responsible.

One or two other points in the Domesday Book are also entitled to
special notice. The most remarkable of these, perhaps, is the
extraordinary advance of Ulster m wealth, compared with the three
other provinces. In the time of Cromwell the value of land in
Ulster was only a third of that of Leinster, and not more than a
half of that of Munster ; it seems to have been not higher than that
of land in Connaught. Now, however, the valuation of Ulster, on an
area of 5,260,203 acres, is £4,125,945 ; that of Leinster, on an area
of 4,812,411 acres, is £4,812,411 ; that of Munster, with its
5,898,370 acres, is £3,31 1 ,085 ; that of Connaught is only £1,421,886,
on an acreage of 4,188,631. In other words the value of land in
Ulster, has, in the space of two short centuries, grown nearly three
times as fast as that of Leinster, and five and six times as fast as the
rest of the south; and it is now not much lower than that of
Leinster, and far greater than that of Munster and Connaught.
No doubt a deduction must here be made, since the rating value of
land in Ulster, on which, and not on rental, this return has been
made, is higher than in the other provinces ; but, even allowing for
this difierence, there can be no question but that the material
progress of Ulster has been a great deal more rapid than that of the
whole of the rest of the island. The fact will, perhaps, be cited to
show the superiority of a Teutonic race, and the connection of Pro-
testantism with the march of prosperity ; nor is the inference possibly
wholly erroneous. Yet I may be allowed to think that this marked
advance of Ulster may, in the main, be duo to causes of a verj’'
different kind — to her monopoly of Irish manufactures, to the com-
parative soundness of her land system, and to the circumstance that
a very large part of her population were never subjected to the
depressing influences which kept the mass of the peasantry else-
where in a state of serfdom. During the last century the North of
England has increased in opulence more quickly than the South ;
what had race or religion to do with the matter P

W. O'OoNNOR Morris.

c c 2

LORD FAIRFAX AT COLCHESTER.

At the meeting of the Archa3ological Institute at Colchester in
August, there was a manifestation of such interest and of such strong
feeling on the question of the execution of the two insurgent officers
after the memorable siege of that town in 1648, that it seems an
opportune moment to examine the various assertions, and to state the
case distinctly and impartially. The excitement caused by the dis-
cussion at Colchester shows the very strong feeling that exists respect-
ing the events of our great civil war ; a feeling which ought by all
means to be encouraged, and which, as it must inevitably give rise
to closer investigation and to the more careful weighing of evidencer
will surely do good. Many fallacies will be exposed, and the true
bearing of historical events will be more correctly appreciated.
Probably some popular idols will be displaced, while the oft-repeated
slanders of former times will be heard no more.

The facta which have given rise to so much argument are suffi-
ciently well known. After the insurgent garrison of Colchester had
surrendered at discretion, a court-martial tried four of its officers and
condemned them to death ; and Lord Fairfax, the commander-in-
chief of the besieging army, remitted the sentence on two, and con-
firmed it on the two others, namely Sir Charles Lucas and Sir
George Lisle.

For this Lord Fairfax is accused of having barbarously committed
a cold-blooded murder from the vilest motives of personal revenge.
The authorities quoted for the murder are Lord Clarendon and an asser-
tion on the tombstone in St. Giles's church at Colchester, where the
condemned officers were buried. The authority for the motive is a
rancorous little foot-note in the work of an obscure writer, which
has been too often copied, suggesting that the General owed Lucas a
grudge for having been handled very roughly by him at the battle
of Marston Moor. It may be remarked, in passing, with reference
to this perversion of history, that Lucas routed Lambert’s I'egiment
at Marston Moor, and was afterwards repulsed and taken prisoner by
the Scottish infantry. He never encoimtered the victorious regiment
of Sir Thomas Fairfax, fortunately for himself.

If the General had been merely an obscure soldier like Lucas or
Lisle, the question would have been of slight importance. But it is
no light matter that a stain should be allowed to dim the scutcheon
of Thomas Fairfax. The fair fame of one of England's most honest
public mpn and greatest generals is the property of his country, and
\Bhould be guarded from the misrepresentations which strong party

LOUD FAIBPAX AT COLCHESTER.

375

feeling gives rise to. There is scarcely any character in the history of
those times respecting whom more may be known than the great Lord
Fairfax. His own voluminous correspondence, and that of his father
and grandfather, carefully preserved by the family, and the laborious
collections of his secretary Hush worth, added to the journals and notes
of his chaplains, of his cousin Brian and others, lay bare every
action and motive of his life, from the day when, as a boy, he fought
imder Lord Vere at Bois-le-duc, to the last scene at Bilbrough when,
surrounded by friends, beloved and respected by both parties alike,
the grave closed upon as brave and true a patriot as England ever
produced. A close scrutiny may be challenged into the actions and
motives of a life which are so amply recorded, and Fairfax will
come forth unscathed from an ordeal which very few historical
characters could bear without damage. He was a bungling politician,
and far too honest and full of scruples to be a successful statesman.
He was also a confused and involyed writer, when Mr. Bushworth or
Mr. Stretton 'was not at hand to correct his rough drafts. But he
was an honest public servant, acting without any motive of self-
interest and solely from a sense of duty. He and his father drew
their swords with extreme reluctance, and not without earnest
attempts to obtain a peaceful settlement. They were Royalists —
their political views are on record — ^they fought for the rights of the
parliament, and for complete liberty of conscience, under a constitu-
tional king. This was their ** good old cause ” "which, thanks in no
small measure to their bravery and skill, after some vicissitudes,
finally triumphed. Thomas Fairfax was not only an accomplished
and successful general, famous alike for dauntless gallantry in the
field and for his generous kindness to the vanquished, he was also
a scholar and an antiquary ; and we owe to his care and research the
preservation of York Minster, and of the colleges and the Bodleian
Library at Oxford, as well as of the valuable books and the priceless
collection of Dodsworth manuscripts which now belong to the
University.

The assertion that such a man committed a barbarous murder in
cold blood from the basest motives must be dismissed as a vile and
dishonest calumny. Nemo repente turpmimus. An honourable
and spotless career disproves the charge. The only question that
can be discussed is whether Lord Fairfax, in conscientiously dis-
charging a painful duty, was or was not mistaken in the view he
took of that duty.

In considering this point it is very important that no false issues
should be allowed, and that two perfectly distinct transactions should
be kept apart. Their confusion has led to much of the misunder-
standing that has obscured the truth. There are two questions. The
first is whether, by the terms of the capitulation, any ofBcer of tbe

376

LORD FAIRFAX AT GOLOHESTER.

garrison could be tried at aU. The second is whether, if they could
be tried under those terms, Lord Fairfax did right in approving the
sentences. It is essential that these two issues should be considered
separately; for during Fairfaxes life the first issue alone was
raised. It was charged against him that the terms of the surrender
precluded him from trying any officer of the garrison. It is a
significant fact that this, and not tho justice or injustice of the
sentences, was the issue raised. The forfeiture of military rights by
a breach of their paroles of honour on the part of the condemned
officers, must have been notorious at the time, for it was the subject of
ii public correspondence between Lord Fairfax and one of them. Yet
this, the cause of their condemnation, was carefully ignored at tho
time by their friends, and was denied by party writers with much
hardihood, until the publication of the Fairfax correspondence placed
the fact beyond doubt.

It was not the reasons which led him to confirm the sentence that
Ijord Fairfax was called upon to defend. It was the fact of the
executions as bearing upon the terms of surrender. Unfortunately
the Qencrars defence was carelessly written nearly a quarter of a
century afterwards, when his memory was failing him, and ho was
suffering from a complication of diseases. It is in the form of some
rough notes, hastily jotted down, and never revised or corrected.
These notes were not intended for publication, and arc full of errors
of memory. The manuscript proves at once that they were first
rough drafts, intended to be shown to friends for correction. They
need, therefore, every sort of allowance. The notes are headed, “ Some
things to be cleared during my command of the army.*'

He says : —

It is fit for me in this place to say somotliing for my own vindication
about my Lord Capol, Sir Charles Lucas, and Sir George Lisle, who were
prisoners at mercy upon the rendering of Colchester : seewg some Jiave quesUoned
the just performance of those articles. After four months’ close siege they wore
compelled to surrender, and that ui)on mercy ; and delivering upon merely is
to he understood that some are to suiTer and tho rest to go free. Immediately
after our entrance ipto tho town, a Council of War was called, and those fore-
named persons were sentenced to die, the rest to bo acquitted. This being so
resolved, I thought fit notwithstanding to transmit the Lord Capel, the Lord
Norwich, &c., over to tho Parliament, being the civil judicature of tho king-
dom, and so most proper judges in their case, who wore considerable for estates
and families ; but Sir Charles liucas and Sir George Lisle, being mere soldiers
of fortune, and falling into our hands by chance of war, were executed, and in
this I did nothing but according to my commission and the trust reposed in me.
Rut it may be objected I wont into the court during the trial, to whidi 1
answer, it was at the earnest request of my Lord Capel’s friends, who desired
me to explain there what was meant by surrendering to mercy, otherwise I
had not gone, being always unsatisfied with those courts.”

The above note only proves that the course of events had been for-
gotten by the old general, and that only a few confused impressions

LORD FAIRFAX AT COLCHESTER.

877

remained on his mind at the time. He had not referred to any docu-
ments to refresh his memory; but if publication had been subse-
quently decided upon, he would, no doubt, with the aid of Mr.
Eushworth, who had a complete knowledge of the ample materials
at hand, have given a valuable narrative to posterity. As it is the
note is full of errors and confusion. The siege, in the first place, did
not last four months, but only two and a half. Secondly, Lord
Capel was not tried or sentenced by the Council of War ; and Lucas
was not a soldier of fortune in the sense of not being considerable
for estates or family.” Nor, in speaking of the court into which he
went, can J’airfax allude, as the context implies, to the Council of
War that condemned the officers, at which he was not present. He
alludes to the High Court of Justice which tried Lord Capel long
afterwards, and before which ho gave evidence as to the terms
of surrender. It was with the unconstitutional civil court that he
was rightly “ unsatisfied.”

W 0 may dismiss this unlucky note, for, as regards the terms of
surrender, Lord Fairfax’s case is impregnable without it. The terms
are printed in llushworth’s collections. They were, that all soldiers
and officers under the rank of captain should have fair quarter, and
that superior officers should surrender to mercy. In reply to an
inquiry, it was further explained in writing that surrendering to
mercy signified surrendering without any assurance of quarter, the
general being free to put some to the sword at once, and to leave
others to be dealt Avith by Parliament. There can, therefore, be no
question that the terms of surrender entitled Lord Fairfax to put
any officer of the garrison on his trial. This was the only point that
was raised at the time, and the only one, therefore, to which the
General, in the note written in his old age, referred. There is no
shadoAV of pretence for accusing him of any breach of the terms of
surrender.

The second question, Avhether he was justified in confirming the
sentences, is far more important. Fortunately his reasons wore
stated clearly enough, though very briefly, in his letter to the
Speaker of the House of Lords, dated the 28th of August, 1648.
They are, —

1. “ The satisfaction of military justice.

2. ‘‘ Avenge for innocent blood they have caused to be spilt,

and the trouble, damage, and mischief they have brought
upon the town, this country, and the kingdom.”

The question immediately arises, what crime had been committed
for which military justice demanded satisfaction ? The answer is at
hand. In the case of Sir Charles Lucas, that officer had broken his
parole of honour to the General not again to fight against the Parlia-
ment. At the commencement of the siege, Lord Fairfax warned

878

LOBD TAIBFAX AT COLCHESTER,

bim that lie bad forfeited bis parole, bis honour, and faith, being*
a prisoner on parole, and therefore was not capable of command or
trust in martial affairs/' ^ It was long maintained by the partisans
of Lucas, that this statement of Lord Fairfax was untrue. Morant,
in his “ History of Essex,” asks when Lucas was ever a prisoner on
parole ; and adds that it behoves the admirers of Lord Fairfax to
explain his letter to Sir Charles. Lord de Grey, in a Memoir of
Lucas, even denies that Lord Fairfax can have mode the accusation*
He argues that because Sprigg, who was Fairfax’s chaplain, spoke
of Lucas as a soldier of valour and reputation, in a book published in
1647, therefore he cannot have forfeited that character by breaking
his parole in 1648 !

But these arguments are now exploded. The letter of Lord Fair-
fax, telling Lucas that ho had broken his word of honour, is still
extant, as well as the reply of Lucas, in which he distinctly admits
that ho had given that parole, although he claims to have been freed
from it subsequently, because ho had compounded for his estates.
He says, —

“ You make exceptions concerning mo as being a prisoner still unto your
lordsbip. Sir, I wonder you should question me of any such engagement, sinco
I purchased my freedom uiid estate at a high rate by a great sum of money,
which 1 paid into Goldsmiths’ llall, for whi(‘h, according to the ordinances of
the two Houses, I was to enjoy my freedom and estate. When I conceived
myself in that condition I sent a letter to your secretary, desiring him to
advertise your lordship that I had punctually performed my engagements as
they stood in relation to your lordship. Upon which 1 had notice from
him that you accepted of my respects to you.”

Lucas thus acknowledges that he had given his parole, but claims
that the payment of a composition for his estates had since freed him
from it. He also seems to insinuate that he had declared to Lord
Fairfax that he was freed from his promise when he paid the fine.
He may, as he says, have sent a message to the effect that he had
up to that time performed his engagements ; but he cannot have
announced that he no longer intended to perform them. Had he'done
BO, he would certainly have been arrested at once. His parole was
exacted that he might not again take arms against the Parlia-
ment. He afterwards got back his estates from the civil power^
with freedom to enjoy them, on payment of a fine, and on under-
taking to live peaceably under the existing Government. How he
could have conceived that his agreement with the civil power could
have been intended to free him from his engagement with the
General, when he was admitted to both with exactly the same
object — namely, to bind him not again to break the peace — it is
impossible to imagine. Far from giving him freedom from his
engagement with the General, his composition increased the obUga-

* (1) Rushworth, vii. p. 1160.

LORD FAIRFAX AT COLCHESTER. 379

tion by binding bim also by another engagement with the civil
power. His excuse was obviously absurd ; but the fact of his having
given his parole of honour not again to serve is proved by his own
admission. This, however, is not needed. The facts are on record
elsewhere. After being taken prisoner at Marston Moor, he must
have been regularly exchanged, for we find him serving Charles
again as Governor of Berkeley Castle. Finally, he was defeated
and taken prisoner, with Sir Jacob Astley, at Stow-in-the-Wold, one
of the last actions of the war, on the 23rd of March, 1646. He must
then have given his parole of honour, with Sir Jacob and the other
ofiicers, not to serve again in arms against the Parliament. The
parole, as Mr. Bell rightly says, is an inevitable corollary from the
fact of having been taken in arms and subsequently liberated. The
gallant old veteran, Sir Jacob Astley, remarked to his captors,
“ Gentlemen, you may now sit down and play, for you have done all
your work, if you fall not out among yourselves.”

The case of Sir George Lisle was exactly similar. He was
Governor of Farringdon, and was included in the articles for the
surrender of Oxford, signed on the 24th of June, 1646, which were
granted on condition that the officers did not again take arms
against the Parliament. He did not adopt Lucas’s excuse, that he
was freed from his word because he had paid a fine to recover his
estates. Probably Lisle had no estates, as he is said to have been of
humble origin : so that, according to the view of Sir Charles Lucas,
he himself was freed from keeping his word because he had estates
to compound for, wdiile his brother officer was still bound by his
word because he had no estates. This is the logical deduction, and
shows the untenable nature of his excuse.

Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle had broken their paroles
of honour given to Lord Fairfax, and that General considered it his
duty to confirm the sentence that they should suffer death, in satis-
faction of military justice.

The other two condemned ofiicers were Colonel Farre, who was
accused of desertion from the army of the Parliament, and an Italian
adventurer named Guasconi, who was tried for bearing arms against
a Government with which his sovereign Avas at peace. Lord Fairfax
considered it unnecessary to carry the sentences on the two latter
officers into execution, and they were consequently remitted.

Although the two officers broke their paroles, an endeavour has
been made to sustain the charge of murder against Lord Fairfax by
alleging that, nevertheless, they were not executed for that offence.
This position rests upon the fact that in the version of the finding of
the Council of War as given by Carter, the insurgent quartermaster-
general who wrote an account of the siege, the specific charges are
not stated. But we have to do with the General’s reasons for con-

380

LORD FAIEFAX AT COLCHKfiTEB.

firming tlie sentence, not with the sentence itself. The considera-
tions which led the o£Scers who formed the Council of War to recoi*d
that sentence do not affect his conduct. It is perfectly clear that
Lord Fairfax felt it to be his duty to confiim the sentence, because
the two officers had broken their paroles of honour. The General’s
whole course of conduct from the first breaking out of the insurrec-
tion proves this beyond doubt. Early iu the previous June, when
at Canterbury, ho j)roclairaed a complete amnesty except for such as
had broken their paroles of honour. On arriving before Colchester one
of his first acts was to warn Sir Charles Lucas that, as he had broken
his word, he was unworthy of trust in martial afiairs. Throughout the
siege he showed the same determination, steadily refusing to listen
to any terms but surrender to mercy, intending to except those who
had placed themselves beyond the pale of inilitary law. After the
surrender he immediately selected for trial those, and those only, who
had made themselves amenable to martial law. Moreover, the attempts
of Lucas and Lisle to escape during the siege, prove that they knew
themselves to be in a position different from that of tlieir brother
officers.

Another suggestion, with a view to raaiiitairiing the charge against
Lord Fairfax, is that the executions were not for a breach of faith on
the part of the two officers, but to carry into elfect an Act of Parlia-
ment passed the 20th June, 1G48, which declared that all who made
war against the Government were traitors, and ordering that they
should be proceeded against as such. The above considerations com-
pletely refute this theory. The General, of courhc, had no power to try
any one for treason, and he did not. He tried those, and those only,
whose offences made them amenable to martial law. All the rest
received quarter, and it was loft for the civil courts to decide whether
or not they had committed the crime of treason.

It is clear, then, that Lord Fairfax was fully justified, by the terms
of the surrender, in trying these officers for their lives ; and it is also
certain that he Approved the sentences of the court-martial, because
Lucas and Lisle w’cre found in arms after having given him their
paroles of honour not again to serve against the Parliament.

But though the justice of Lord Fairfax’s decision has been esta-
blished, it may still be a question whether there was any necessity
for exacting the full penalty, and whether this was not a case for a
display of generosity on the part of the conqueror.

No general of that age ever showed a greater dcsiro to mitigate the
evils of war than Fairfax. Many and many were the families which he
saved from ruin by securing for them a reasonable composition. At
Bristol, at Exeter, at Oxford, the conditions he granted were excep-
tionally lenient and generous. They gave occasion for murmuring and
complaint among the more zealous partisans of the Parliament. No

LOBD FAIBFAX AT OOLGHESTEB.

381

man changes the whole tenor of his life of a sudden and without
reason. There must, therefore, have been some strong motive for the
sterner line of conduct ^ich he adopted at Colchester. In little more
than a year, from April 1645 to June 1646, Fairfax had organized and
disciplined a new army, had utterly broken the power of the enemy
in a great pitched battle, and had by a succession of sieges, rapid
marches, and decisive victories, put an end to a disastrous civil war,
and restored peace. He had thus performed a great service to his
country.* Ho believed that the settlement of the nation might now
be proceeded with by negotiation, and that peace would, after a long
and disastrous period of commotion, at length bring back prosperity
to England.

But the means by wliich he had secured this end were the pro-
mises of the captured officers not to sci've again in arms against the
Government. If those promises were kept the war could not well bo
renewed, for an army could not take the field without officers. But
if the officers who had given their woi'ds of honour not again to take
arms, proved faithless, all the horrors of war would again spread
devastation over the land. This is what Sir Charles Lucas and Sir
George Lisle had done ; and they did not stand alone. Others, even
including Sir Thomas Glemham, the former governor of Oxford, were
following their example. If honour would not restrain them, it was
absolutely neccssar)’’, for tlie security of peace, that a severe example
should be made. The maintenance of the peace, so lately restored,
demanded that a lieavy penalty should be exacted for breaking a
parole of honour.

Painful as it must necessarily have been to a man so exceptionally
humane and generous as Lord Fairfax, he was, therefore, bound by
considerations of duty to his country to confirm the sentences of
death on Lucas and Lisle. The event proved that this decision was
as politic as it was just. Others who had risen in arms almost imme-
diately disappeared, or escaped beyond seas. The object was fully
attained, and peace was rest/ored to the land.

Yet I would be the last man to speak harshly of the two officers
who suffered. Wo may venerate Washington, while we admire and
respect the gallantry of Iilajor Andrd. We may concur in the
justice and necessity of Fairfax’s decision, while we applaud the
chivalry and devotion of the officers he condemned to death. Sir
Charles Lucas, although Lord Clarendon describes him as a man of
an ill understanding and a rough and proud nature, was a gentleman
of property, who had devoted his life to a cause which ho believed
to bo right. Sir George Lisle had done the same. They were
gallant soldiers who risked their all without a thought for their own
interests. We may fairly believe that they, by some specious
reasoning, were persuaded that they had been freed firom their

382 .

LOBD FAIHFAX AT COLCHESTER.

promise to the General, and that they did not consciously forfeit
their honour. They died as they had lived, like true-hearted
gentlemen. Their friends have dishonoured them by cutting a
truculent falsehood on their grave-stone. The venerator of the
great Lord Fairfax honours the memory of those unfortunate
officers whom it was that Gencrars painful but imperative duty to
condemn to death.

An excited orator at Colchester declared that now, as then, if
need be, thousands of swords would fly from their scabbards in
defence of their Queen. Certainly ! but they would be flghting the
fight of Fairfax, not that of Lucas. They would be fighting for a
Queen whose claim is based on the Act of Settlement and on the
love of her people, not for divine right and perfidious despotism.
The cause for which Lucas fought is dead and buried. The good
old cause for which Fairfax drew his sword has triumphed, and we
trust will live while this nation continues to exist. It is worthy
of note that our present dynasty descends from that Queen of Bohemia
who would have been deserted in her utmost need by her selfish
father, had not the people of England indignantly insisted upon
help being sent to her. Then Vere and Essex and Fairfax and
Sheffield, and many others whose names are known as soldiers of
the Parliament, hurried to the Bhine; and William and John
Fairfax fell gloriously at Frankenthal, fighting in her defence.
Prince Rupert remembered this when he occupied Denton Hall, the
seat of the Fairfaxes, on his march to York, and he gave orders that
their house should not be injured.

The descendant of that lady for whom the Fairfaxes fought and
died is now Queen of England. That civil and religious liberty for
which the Fairfaxes drew their swords is now firmly established. The
great General died in the dark days of the second Charles, but the
words of confident hope that he spoke a little while before his death
were prophetic. He said, I hope that God will one day clear this
cause we undertook, so far as concerns his honour and the integrity
of such as faithfully served Him ; for 1 cannot believe that such
wonderful successes have been given in vain, and, though cunning
and deceitful men must take shame to themselves, the purposes and
det^pninations of God shall have a happy eflbct, to his glory and the
comfort of his people.”

Cl^EMENTS R. MaKKHAM.

STEPHEN’S DIGEST OF THE LAW OF EVIDENCE.'

Thebe is a growing opinion among persons interested in the formal
improvement of English law, that the chief if not the only likeli-
hood of getting anything considerable accomplished in that direction
is, for the present, in private enterprise. Parliament cares very
little about the matter, and the public for the most part knows so
little that it may be practically said to care not at all ; nor is any
one likely to take it up on public grounds until it has been shown
by example, so far as the example of private and unofficial exposition
can show it, that the undertaking is desirable and practicable. Such
an example is now supplied by Mr. Fitzjamcs Stephen in his Digest
of the Law of Evidence, which is an experiment now tried for the
first time in the application of the method of the Indian Codes to
the matter of English law, such as it exists at home. The Indian
Evidence Act (I. of 1872) was the fruit of Mr. Stephen’s work
as Legal Member of Council. It is in the main founded upon the
English law of evidence, and on the whole represents its principles ;
but it departs from it, for various reasons, in several points, and
some of them are important. An Evidence Act for England was
projected by the late Government, and a Bill was actually drafted
by Mr. Stejjhen, but never jDroceeded with. Hence the origin of
the present work, whose object, however, is to state the law such as
it is now found. The advantages of stating it in a concise and
definite form are maintained by Mr. Stephen, as against the advocates
of the so-called elasticity of the common law, in an introduction to
one or two special points of which we may recur later in this article.
Certainly this elasticity is a word of great virtue, and covers a
multitude of confusions. “ The rottenness gives it elasticity,” says
the warden of the decaying sea wall in Peacock’s admirable tale,
with manifest allusion to the British Constitution and the Reform
Bill; and the commendation seems to me about as appropriate in
the one case as in the other. The business of a civilised system of
law is to furnish a standard and measure of legal duties. Do we
praise a foot-rule for being clastic ? or is a pendulum the better for
being sensitive to changes of temperature ? But the general question
of codification has been excellently treated by Mr. Stephen himself ;
let us forbear from this, and turn to his present work.

The differences in detail between this Digest and the Indian
Evidence Act are by the nature of the case considerable. We are

(1) ** A Digest of the Law of Evidence.’* By James Fitzjames Stephen, Q.C. Lon-
don: Macmillan A Co., 1876.

884 Stephen’s digest of the law of evidence.

here dealing with the law of England, and that not as any particular
theory of legislation might wish it to be, nor eyen as a draftsman,
armed with a discretion to omit obsolete enactments and decide
minor unsettled questions, might desire it, if only for the sake of
neatness, to appear, but just as it is upon the existing authorities.
There is only one point, however, on which there is any real differ-
ence of principle ; and this is important enough to call for special
discussion.

The second chapter of the Indian Evidence Act is entitled, “ Of
the Relevancy of Facts.*’ In all but the very simplest cases it is
necessary to give evidence of facts which are not themselves the
facts in issue. It is equally necessary to have some understood
limit set, either by legislation or by tradition and precedent, to the
kinds of facts which, not being themselves in issue, may be received
as part of the elements for decision. The question thus arising
may be shortly put in the form. What facts arc relevant P The
commoner English usage is to speak of such and such facts being
or not being evidence for particidar purposes ; but this carries with
it an ambiguity in the meaning of the word evidence which must
obviously be cut off if our language on the subject is to have any
reasonable amount of exactness. The Indian Act, then, answers this
question in the chapter above mentioned by laying down rules as to
the relevancy of facts which stand in various particular relations
to facts in issuo or other facts known to be relevant. It also
propounds a general theory of relevancy in the seventh and eleventh
sections, which are as follows : —

“ 7. Facts which are the occasion, canse, or effect, imTnediato or otherwise,
of relevant facts or facts in issuo, or which constitute tho state of things under
which they happened, or which afforded an opportunity for their occuiTence or
transaction, are relevant.

11. Facts not otherwise relevant are relevant : —

(1.) If they are inconsistent with any fact in issuo or relevant fact ;

(2.) If by themselves or in connection with other facts theynaake the
existence or non-existence of any fact in issue or relevant fact
highly probable or improbable.”

The theory on which these sections are founded is set forth by
Mr. Stephen in the introduction to his English edition of the Act ;
and tho general principle is stated to be, in effect, that all facts are
relevant to one another which appear to bo links in the same chain
of consequence : ** Facts may be regarded as relevant which can be
shown to stand either in the relation of cause or in the relation of
effect to the fact to which they are said to be relevant.” Mr. George
Clifford Whitworth, of the Bombay Civil Service, has lately criticized
this theory in an ingenious and able pamphlet, and the frank
acceptance of his criticism by Mr. Stephen enables us to enjoy the
cont^plfttion, as gratifying as it is rare, of a controversy which has

385

STEPHEN'S DIGEST OP THE LAW OF EVIDENCE,

ended in a real advancement of knowledge^ and in a manner per-
fectly satisfying and honourable to both parties. Mr. Whitworth
points out that the theory as enunciated omits a collateral relation
of facts which may be quite as important as the lineal one. Eacts
may be relevant to one another not only when they are links in the
same chain, but when they are links in two chains having a common
link in some other part of their length; that is, when they are
effects of the same cause or causes of the same effect. It is not the
case, however, that facts are always relevant when they answer this
description. For there are many facts of a general kind, such as
the known uniformities of nature, whose occurrence in a sequence
of events can afford no ground for inference as to whether any other
particular fact does or does not occur as another link in the same
sequence, or as a link in another sequence branching from it.

“ Thus there arc four classofi of facts which aid in determining a fact in
issue : —

(1.) Any part of the fact alleged, or any fact implied by the fact alleged.

(2.) Any cause of the fact.

(3.) Any effect of tho fact,

(4.) Any fact having a common cause with the fact in issue.

And it i.s not tho whole of those facts that are of use. ►Some facts connected
with the fact in issue in one of tho four ways mentioned may be of a general
iiatum, existing whether or not the fact in issue happened, and therefore
indicating nothing as to whether it happened or not. For example : A. is
charged with tho murdoi* of IJ. by pushing him over a precipice. Hero the
fall of D. to tho ground alter ho was pushed over is as much a cause of his
death as tho luishing over, and as much an effect of tho push as his death is*
Dut gravitation is a general fact and exists all the same whothfT 15. went over
tho 2 ^rccipico or not, and proof of it is therefore needless. ”

Again, other facts may he specifically connected \vilh the fact in
issue, “ but with such a very slight bearing upon it that their pro-
bative force is quite insignificant.” Hence Mr. Whitworth limits
his doctrine by the proviso that “ no fact is relevant to another
unless it makes the existence of that other more likely.” And he
states it, as thus limited, in the follow’^ing series of rules.

“Eulol. No fact is rolcv.int which does not make tho existence of a fact
in issue more likely or uiilikclj’, and that to such a degree as the judge con-
siders will aid him in deciding the issue.

llulo II. Subject to llule I., the following facts are relevant : —

(1.) Facts which are part of, or which arc implied by, a fact in issue; or
which show the absence of what might be expected as a part of, or would seem
to bo implied by, a fact in issue.

(2.) Facts which arc a cause, or which show the absence of what might be
expected as a cause, of a fact in issue.

(3.) Facts which are an effect, or which show the absence of what might be
expected as an effect, of a fact in issue.

(4.) Facts which are an effect of a cause, or which show the absence of what
Slight be expected as an effect of a causo, of a fact in issue.

Buie ni. Facts which affirm or den}*’ the relevancy of facts alleged to be
relevant under Buie II. are relevant.

Buie IV. Facts relevant to relevant facts arc relevant.*'

386

sxephek’s digest of the law of evidence.

He then goes through all the illustrations Appended to the sections
of the Indian Evidence Act which treat of relevancy/ and shows
that every one of the cases there dealt with falls within his general
rules ; whereas it is hard to bring some of them within the general
definition of the Act, although they are covered by the text of the
more specific sections to which they belong. In short, his position
is of this kind. The Act seems intended to lay down general propo-
sitions giving a complete theory of relevancy, and also to make
especial provision for a certain number of the particular forms of
relevancy which have been found in judicial experience to be most
important. These more specific propositions, whose establishment
was, of course, prior in point of time to the treatment of the
subject as a whole, and was in fact required in order to make such
treatment possible, will nevertheless appear in a complete exposi-
tion as applications of the more general principle, chosen to be thus
expressed in detail either for greater convenience in use or by way
of abundant caution. But in the Act, Mr. Whitworth says, the
general principle as stated docs not cover the specific provisions,
and ho states it in a new form which docs fulfil this requirement.
He likewise observes that, without some such limitation as that
given by him in his first rule, the Court may find itself compelled
to admit evidence which manifestly has no bearing on the question
at issue.

Mr. Stephen, adopting in substance Mr. Whitworth's view, has in
the present Digest recast the general statements as to the relevancy
of facts, and they stand thus : —

“Art. 2. Evidence may bo given in any action of the existenco or non-
existence of any fact in issue, and of any fact relevant to any fact in issue, and
of no others.

The judge may exclude evidence of facts which, though relevant to the
issue, appear to him too remote to be material under all the circumstances of
the case.

Art. 9. Facts, whether in issue or not, are relevant to each other, ^\dleu one
is, or probably may be, or probably may have been —
the cause of the other ; ^

the effect of the other ;
an effect of the same cause ;
a cause of the same effect ;

or when the one shows that the other must or cannot have occurred,
or probably docs or did exist, or not ;
or that any fact does or did exist, or not, which in the common course of
events would either have caused or have been caused by the other ;
provided that such facts do not fall within the exclusive rules contained in
Chapters iii., iv., v., vi., or that they do fall within the exceptions to those
rules contrined in those chapters.”

The proviso seems designed to meet another objection incidentally

(1) It is to be remembered that these iUostrations are a substantive part of the law,
sad of equal authority with the text.

•387

STEPHEN'S DIGEST OF THE LAW OF EVIDENCE.

put forward by Mr. Whitworth, who remarks that, while in the
corresponding part of the Indian Act “ relevant means logically
relevant, it is afterwards used without warning, in a more limited
sense, to denote what is admissible in evidence : many things being
relevant in the first sense which are admmible,

_ There can be little doubt, I think, mkt this is an improvement on
the language of the Indian Act ; but it appears to me to be still
open to criticism on the ground of not carrying out its object in a
consistent manner. That object is to give a general and at the same
time a definite account of the various marks by which one fact may
be known to bo relevant to another. The ninth article gives us four
such marks, and so far well ; but then we have this addition : —

Or when the one shows that the other must or cannot have occurred,
or probably does or did exist, or not.**

And surely the effect of these words is nothing else than to relegate
us to the unconscious logic of common sense which it was the office
of the definition to unravel. Mr. Stephen himself says in his note
that the general principle “ might no doubt be expressed very
shortly by saying that every fact is relevant to every other, if it
affects in any definite way the probability of its occurrence. This,
however, would throw no light on the question how facts affect the
probability of the occurrence of other facts.’’ But now what says
the text ? It tells us that there are four defined ways in which
“ facts affect the probability of the occurrence of other facts,’' and
also an undefined number of undefined ways, coinciding to an unde-
fined extent with those already named. In truth, instead of choosing
between a scientific analysis and a popular general statement, it
gives us both at once ; and we are left to guess as best we can how
much more, if anything, is meant to be included in the popular form
of the proposition than in the exact one. This objection is less
applicable to Mr. Whitworth’s rules. But his first rule, which
limits the definition by showing what is not relevant, is a practical
abandonment of the scientific form of the others ; and in dealing
with the illustrations of the Evidence Act he seems to assume once
or twice the converse of this rule, namely that a fact is relevant
which (to the intuitive judgment of common sense, and to an appre-
ciable extent) makes the existence of a fact in issue more likely or
unlikely. The grounds on which the judgment of common sense
proceeds may perhaps be capable in every case of being exhibited
in terms of' the more definite rules ; but then it should be made
clear, even to superfluity, that the definite rules are of themselves
sufficient.

Or is it felt that after all it may not be quite safe to trust the
logical nile to cover everything without the help of more largely
and loosely framed additions ? Notwithstanding all that has been

VOL. XX. N.S. D D

388

Stephen’s digest op the law op eyidencb.

done by Mill and others to elucidate the nature of inductiv(5 proof,
it is still quite possible to doubt whether the process of inference
can be completely and accurately expressed in any formal canons ;
and it may be wise to leave r^m for this doubt in an exposition of
the logical rules which isirended for men’s practical guidance.
If such is the intention, Rwever, it would be more clearly shown
by some such re-arrangement of Mr. Stephen’s ninth article as
follows : —

Facts, whether in issue or not, are relevant to each other —
when the one shows that the other must or cannot have
occurred, or probably docs or did exist, or not ;
or that any fact docs or did exist, or not, which in the common
course of events would either have caused or have been
caused by the other; and in particular when one is, or
probably may be, or probably may have been —
the cause of the other ;
the effect of the other ;
an effect of the same cause ;
a cause of the same effect ;

provided, &c.

But 1 find myself compelled to go beyond any suggestion of
verbal and logical amendments. I think it extremely doubtful
whether the logical theory of proof, which is common to all know-
ledge, should appear as part of the Law of Evidence at all, though I
fully agree with Mr. Stephen that one cannot understand the law of
evidence without some previous understanding of the nature of
proof in general. Legislation affecting the tenure of land is very
likely to do more harm than good unless it is guided by sound
economic knowledge, nor can its objects and effect be appreciated
witheut such knowledge ; but who would think of incorporating the
economic definition of rent in an Agricultural Holdings Act ? Again,
there can be no inheritance without death, and the fact of death
must be proved ; but the physiological definition of death is certainly
no part of the law of succession. It appears to me that a legal text-
writer, and still more a legislator, should confine himself as much
as possible to the questions proper to his own science, and avoid mix-
ing up the substance of the law with propositions which belong to
other branches of knowledge, or are common to all alike. If the
Law of Evidence is to embody the canons of inductive logic to the
extent of Mr. Whitworth’s Rules or Mr. Stephen’s ninth article, I
do not see "why it should stop short of giving a complete exposition
of them, and landing us, perhaps, in the thick of a purely meta-
physical controversy on the true meaning of Cause. ^

Mr. Stephen refers to a late case of Reg. v. Parbhualk,^ in the
(l) Law Journal^ May 27, 1876.

STEPHEN’S DIGEST OP THE LA.W OP EYIDENCE. 889

High Court of Bombay, as showing that the eleventh section of the
Indian Evidence Act requires to be limited in some such way as he
has now followed in the Digest. In that case several prisoners were
charged with forgery. There were fcund in the possession of some
of them a number of blank stamp pS^s, documents puri^orting to
be deeds signed by various persons, and cN;her things of the like sort,
all appearing, as matter of ordinary judgment and inference, to bo
the stock in trade of systematic and habitual forgers. These facts
were held not admissible, notwithstanding the general wording of
Section 11 of the Act, which was held to be restrained by a pre-
sumable intention, to be gathered from other more specific sections,
not to go beyond the English law. Section 54, in particular,
expressly makes a previous conviction relevant ; but nothing is said
about facts from which a previous offence may be inferred. The
papers and documents in this case w'cre iwima facie evidence of a
great number of other offences of the same kind as that in issue.
But the rule remained, it was said, that evidence of crime A. is not
admissible in order to prove a cognate but unconnected crime B ;
and the rule, though severely tried in this case, must bo maintained.
Mr. Justice West’s judgment has thus established a judicial con-
struction of the general terms of the Act which will have to be dealt
w'ith whenever the Act is revised. The question presents itself
whether a revised definition of relevancy in the form of Mr. Stephen’s
ninth article would suffice. The court has to decide whether A.
forged a particular document ; the prosecution offers to show that. A.
had in his possession, about the time of the alleged offence, a great
number of forged documents in various stages of completeness. Is
it possible to say that this body of facts is not relevant within the
definition as being an “ effect of the same cause ” as the forgery in
issue ? Both would be effects, and that in an obvious and direct
manner, of A.’s making a trade of forgery. Still less could these
facts be excluded as not making the fact in issue more or less likely ;
for no reasonable man, considering the case for any extrajudicial
purpose, could help giving much weight to them. A case of this
sort can of course bo provided for by an express exception. Mr.
Stephen’s next article runs thus :

*'Art. 10. Similar hat Unconnixted Facta. The occurrence of a fact similar
to, but not specifically connected in any of the ways hereinbefore mentioned
with, the facts in issue, is not to be regarded as redevant to the existence of
such facts, except in the cases specially excepted in this chapter.”

The language of this as it stands might possibly be held to cover
such a case as Reg. v. Parhhudas^ and very slight changes in the
text, with perhaps one or two additional illustrations, would place it
beyond a doubt.

But a real instance of difficulty like this tends, I think, to

D D 2

390 Stephen’s digest of the la.w of evidence.

Btrengtlieii the argument for treating the general definition of rele-
vancy as a matter not for enactment, but for unofficial instruction
and discussion. If safeguards are wanted for the rules of evidence
as they are now found in practice, they should be specifically provided.
And I venture to suggest that it would be an improvement if the
definition of relevancy were given in the text only in some such
popular form as is supplied by the latter part of Mr. Stephen's ninth
article, the specific rules increased in number, if necessary, and the
discussion of the theory in its general form confined to a note or
appendix, as being a matter not of law but of logic.

It may be said, however, that an Evidence Act has or may have te
be administered by people who are new to logic as well as to law, so
that a wise legislator will give them both together at the risk of some*
scientific or artistic imperfection, or even of practical difiicultios in a
few exceptional cases. As regards India this consideration is obviously
entitled to great weight. In England the question might be a nice
one, but it would lead us too far to enter upon it in this place.

This matter has been dwelt on at some length, not only as being
important in itself, but because it very well illustrates the kind of
questions which present themselves when one attempts to express the
more general principles of the law in a systematic form. As for the
difficulty of applying this process to the more limited rules which
are the ordinary instruments of forensic and judicial thought, I
agree with Mr. Stephen that it is very much overrated. It is a work,
of course, that demands care and skill, and for the most part no small
trouble and patience in verifying and comparing the authorities at
first hand. But this book shows that it can be cfiectually done. It
is possible for a critical reader to desire, especially from the point of
view of an equity lawyer, that some things had been more fully
brought out ; it is difficult, for example, to see why the peculiar rule
which, in cases of a gift made to a person holding a position of
authority or influence over the giver, throws on the receiver the
burden of proving that the gift was freely made, should not have an
article to itself instead of being left to bo implied from an illustration ;
and this rule is in fact expressed in a distinct section (Section 111) of
the Indian Evidence Act. Observations of this kind, however, go
to the scale and proportions of the undertaking. The actual work-^
manship is on the whole singularly free from defects. It would be
hard to find a severer test of it than in the rule as to estoppel by con-
duct (Art. 102 of the Digest) which has been gradually constructed
by several modem decisions, and may be taken as among the most
characteristic specimens of the good side of our case-law. Mr.
Stephen gives this rule in two paragraphs which, at all events when
taken with the illustrations, are perfectly clear, and which an

STEPHEN'S DIGEST OP THE LAW t)F EVIDENCE.

391

examination of tho authorities shows to he unimpeachable except in
a single phrase.^

The general effect of the method here adopted from the Indian Act
is not only to make the subject as a whole intelligible to laymen who
may desire to acquaint themselves with it, but to bring out the lead-
ing points with a clearness and certainty in which the professional
reader, accustomed to the long-drawn indecision of tho text-books,
will find exceeding comfort, and the student in search of instruction
a far more ready and congenial guide than has hitherto been provided
for him. Another important use of systematic arrangement is, as
Mr. Stephen points out in his introduction, that if we consider it
eimply as a method of exposition, it affords the means of estimating
at their true worth the real substantial merits of English law.
Jlentham’s destructive criticism has done its work in removing most
of the absurdities which formerly disfigured the law of evidence, and
if his books are partly forgotten it is because, as Mr. Stephen happily
says, they are ‘‘like exploded shells, buried under tho ruins which
they have made.” And Bentbani’s habit of undervaluing what was
really good in the system he criticized now survives in very few
quarters. There has arisen from quite another side, however, a school
or sect of legjil study which is prone to do scant justice to the law of
England in another way. Much has been and is said, with many
degrees of reasonableness and unreasonableness, on the study of
lioman law, and not unfrequently it is said or implied that the Roman
f^ystem, either as we find it in the Corpus J uris, or as it is recast in
the treatises of modem writers, is in some way superior to our own,
and to be taken as a model. On this point Mr. Stephen’s warning
is so much to the purpose that I feel bound to cite it in his own
words : —

** It would bo difficult to exaggerate tbo valuo of these studios, but their
nature and use is liable to bo misunderstood. The history of the Roman
law no doubt throws groat light on tho history of our own law ; and the com-
parison of the two groat bodies of law, under ouo or the other of which the
laws of the civilised world may be classified, cannot fail to be in every way
most instructive, but the history of bygone institutions is valuable mainly
because it enables us to understand, and so to improve, existing institutions.
It would bo a complete mistake to suppose either that the Homan law^ is in
substance wiser than our own, or that in point of arrangement and method tho
Institutes and tho Digest are anything but warnings. The pseudo-philosophy
of the Institutes and tho confusion of the Digest are to my mind infinitely
more objectionable than tho absence of arrangement and of all geuoitil theories,
good or bad, which distinguish the law of England.”

(1) I am not satisfied with the words intentionaUy causes or permits another person to
holieve a thing to bo true; ” for they do not cover the case of conduct not meant to
produce a bdief, biit which might appear to a reasonable man to be so meant, and is
reasonably taken and acted upon in that sense. I think an additional clause or an
«xplanation is wanted. If ** permits ” were read apart from ** intentionally ” as the
article stands, it would make the rule on the other hand too wide.

S92‘ STEPHEN'S PldEST OF THE LAW OF EVIDENCE.

The truth is that the Eoman law was essentially a body of case-
law, formed, indeed, for the most part not by judicial decisions but
by extrajudicial opinions, and having a striking resemblance to our
own in the main features of its growth. At the time when the
very crude and hasty consolidation eflfccted by Justinian^s commis-
sioners, who often did not understand the authorities they were
handling, produced the Pandects and the Code, the Roman citizen
or lawyer was subject to all, and more than aU, the disadvantages
of the modern Englishman. There was the same formless abundance
of material, and there was not the regulating and classifying influence
of judicial precedent. As for the Digest, I have no hesitation in
aflBrming that Fisher’s Digest is an infinitely bettor performance
both for method and for utility ; and if nobody proposes to give
that excellent book the force of law, to the exclusion of the Reports
on which it is founded, that only proves that our notions of legal
science are much in advance of Justinian’s.

The reason why the comparative study of the laws of England
and of Rome is eminently instructive is not that the Roman system
has a different kind of merit from our own, but that it has the same
kind of merits and defects. The w^ay of thinking of the great
Roman lawyers, after allowing for what may be called difl’orcnces of
local colour, is wonderfully like that of English judges, both when
they go right and when they go astray. The fallacy of supposing
Roman law to be substantially or scientifically better than our own
is due, I believe, partly to limited comparisons in departments where
local accidents have had peculiar results, partly to the fact that
there are no good elementary books on the civil law of England as a
whole, whereas the labour and ingenuity of modern German writers
have provided several upon that of Romc.^

Besides making clear the general merits of the law of England, Mr.
Stephen’s plan of definite and systematic statement likewise calls
attention in the most eflective way to the points where it is in need of
amendment. The text-books have infinite devices for gliding over
anomalies and softening down absurdities ; they feed us with introduc-
tory phrases and soothing particles, with the largely significant “ but,”
the charitable “ perhaps,” the modest “ it seems,” and the still more
delicate “ it should seem.” There is much to bo Icaint from the
baroness of a categorical enunciation. Article 91 of this Digest, for
instance, tells us that if the language of a document applies in
part but not with accuracy to surrounding circumstances,” the
Court may draw inferences from surrounding circumstances as to the

(1) Simdry thmgs I have asserted in the last two paragraphs may bo startling at
flfst isght. As it is impossible to give tho reasons hero, I can only say that the opinions
tluis expressed^ are neither new nor nnconsidered.

STEPHEN'S DIGEST OF THE LAW OF EVIDENCE. 593

meaning of tlic document, but may not receive evidence of any
statement made by tho author of the document as to the intention of
the language used. The next paragraph of tho same article tells us
that the language of the document, though plain in itself, applies
equally well to more objects than one, evidence may be given both
of surrounding circumstaiiccH and of statements made by any party
to tho document as to liis intentions in reference to the matter to
wdiich tho document relates.^’ Such is the rule established by the
eases ; but can any good reason be given for admitting declarations
of intention in the one state of things and excluding them in the
other ? Mr. Stephen thinks not ; and his opinion is borne out by a
remark made by Lord Selborne two years ago, in addressing the
House of Lords on a very curious and difficult case, in which the
exclusive nile was applied. Again, it will startle many persons to
learn that tho following article represents the settled practice of our
Courts :

“ When a witnoss is cross-examined, lie may ... be asked any questions
wbich tend —

(1.) To tost his accuracy, voracity, or credibility ; or
(2.) To shako his (srodit, by injuring his character,
lie may bo compelhul to answer any such question, however irrelevant it may
be to the facts in issue, and howfjvor disgraceful tho answer may bo to him-
self, except in tho c:is(^ ])rovidcd for in Article 120 (namclj", where tho answer
Tiiight expose him to a criminal charge or a penalty).’*

This is illustrated by an extreme instance, which in fact happened
in the course of the late trial of Orton. On this Mr. Stephen
observes in his note :

“ Suppose, for instance, a medical man were called to i)rovo tho hict that a
slight wound hud hceii iiiilictod, and had been attended to by him, would it be
lawful, under pretence of testing his credit, to compel him to answer upon
oath a scries of questions as to his private affairs, extending over many years,
and tending to expose truiisactious of the most delicate and secret kind in
which tho fortiuio and character of other persons might be involved ? If this
is the law, it should bo altered.”

The Indian Evidence Act gives a discretion to the Court as to
allowing questions of this kind ; and probably few reasonable persons
will be found to maintain that we should not do well to follow the
example.

‘ Another point which must not pass without mention is the
remarkable improvement in the exposition of the statute law relating
to evidence. Tho Acts affecting various parts of the subject have
been sometimes ill-drawn, and almost always ill-arranged or devoid
of arrangement. One in particular, 14 & 15 Viet. c. 99, is a real
curiosity of confusion. Those parts of it which concern the law of

394

Stephen’s digest of the law of evidence.

evidence are distributed through half-a-dozen different articles of
Mr. Stephen’s book ; and at one point four sections, framed on the
favourite plan of exhamtio per emmerafionm simpUeem^ are condensed
with great advantage into a single paragraph. Several other
enactments are materially shortened and elucidated, partly by
omitting matter which becomes uuneccssaiy when the substance of
the kw is presented in its appropriate context, partly by direct
amendment of the language.

To sum up : this experiment of Mr. Stephen’s is likely on all
accounts to be a highly valuable one. If the book is found useful
and successful in practice, as fur my own part I doubt not that it
will be, a real step will at once be gaim'd in the cause of the rational
and orderly arrangement of our law, for which Mr. Stephen has
lifted up his voice, too often in the wilderness, these many years
past. In any case it is an example which must be fruitful sooner or
later. The immediate uses of the book as an instrument of legal
education, and as a store of information for laymen, are likewise
considerable, but of less ultimate interest.

rRKDKincK Pollock.

(1) For example ; you may say in one section Unit it is an offence to strike u inan
with an oak stick, in another that it is an offence to strike him with an ash slick, and
in a third that it is an offence to strike him with any otlier kind of stick ; provided
alw'uys that a ground ush, bamboo cane, horsewhip, or any other instrument in the
nature of u stick, shall bo deemed to be a stick withi:i the xiieaiiiii^ of this Act. Or
you may have, if you please, an interpretation cluiise to make stick” mean and
include pfround ash, cane, &c. Finally yon may bethink yourself, ufler a few years,
that striking with or without a stick might as well be made an offence too. Then you
enact accordingly, and leave the whole tale of clauses on the statute-book, or still
hotter, you re-enact them all, and call llic thing a Consolidation Act ; for if you set
about really consolidating, who know\s but you might incautiously repeiil something
material ? This is hardly an exaggeration of some of the performances to which our
Legislature has committed itself even of late years.

EOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

The capital defect of the plan of campaign adopted by the Servians has
had results that might have been foreseen. Instead of concentrating the
forces at their disposal at a single spot where they might have gained an
important success, they dispersed them in four different directions, and so
found themselves too weak at each point to penetrate Turkish territory. Their
offensive campaign rapidly became defensive. The principal army, commanded
by Tchernayeff, at first attempted to turn Nish, thus forcing the Turks to
fall back on Sofia, on pain of being cut off from their base of operations ;
but the 2 )lan failed. The Turks were not shaken in their position.
Tcheniayeff no doubt found himself too weak to gain a decisive victory,
and after a prolonged inaction on the side of Pirot and Ak Palanka, which
he had occupied, he was forced to return into Servia to bar the road
against the advance of the Turkish army, lie took a position on the Upper
Timok, he had even thrown up entrenchments, but after several days’
struggle in the neighbourhood of Kujazevatz, his lieutenant, Horvatovitch,
was driven back, and the Servian positions carried by Abdul Kerim, who
slowly advanced towards the ]\Iorava valley.

Towards the Danube, Lcschaiiin had defended Saitschar with the
greatest bravery ; he had repulsed with admirable Urmness the repeated
attacks of the enemy, superior as they were in numbers ; but the Turks
liaving crossed the Timok after the defeat of Horvatovitch’s division,
Leschanin was obliged to evacuate Saitschar in order to avoid being cut off’,
and Bcr the Turks were able to advance without a blow. Tchernayeff,
appointed commander-in-chief, with another llussian officer, Becker,
as chief of the staff, at length decided to concentrate his forces
for the defence of the Morava Valley. He took up a strong position at
Alexinatz. This has been the scone of an obstinate conflict. Ahmed
Eyoob made a vigorous attempt to storm, but was driven back with heavy
losses. Horvatovitch, with a body of ten thousand troops, marched down
the Morava Valley, and came on the rear of the Turkish right. The Turkish
right was thus placed between Horvatovitch and Tchernayeff, and was
driven out; a union was effected between the two divisions of the
Servian forces. On the 23rd, the Servians made a vigorous sally from
Alexinatz, drove the Turks back along the whole line, and retook the
heights on the left bank of the river. These successes have real import-
ance, both for the influence they will have upon negotiations for peace, and
for the memory which they will leave to inspire the Servian people when
they next repeat the attack of 1876.

Tho Montenegrins were more fortunate in the opening of the campaign.
Prince Nikita inflicted a complete defeat on the army of Mukhtar near
Bilek, and Mukhtar was only saved by the speed of his horse. The
Turkish army was blockaded near Trebigne, and seems to be in a critical
position. It is not impossible, however, so far as we can judge, that the
Montenegrins may even yet find themselves turned by their enemies.

396

HOME AND FOBEIQN APPAIES.

At Belgrade on the eve of the successes at AJoxinatz, Prince Milan snin-
ntoned the foreign consuls and announced a desire for the mediation of the gioat
Polvers. Whether the repulse of the Turks -will induce the peace party
and the Prince to change their minds, and whether the Turks will conaont
to listen to the voice of mediators before they have decisively shown the
Servians the helplessness of any military attempts to throw off the yoke,
oro questions that for the moment remain unanswered. The air is thic '
with chaotic rumours; everything is asserted and everything is denied.
Meanwhile nothing has happened, and nothing can happen, to alter the
broad truths of the situation. The idea of nationality, like a rdigious faith,
is stimulate d by adversity. Whatever happens to-day, the future belongs
to the Slavs. That is the capital fact of which we must never lose sight.
Consider the prodigious progress that the national idea has made within the
last twenty years. At the time of the Crimean War it existed as a dream
in the writings of pools and philologers. Now it is the dominant element
in the situation. It is because they ignored this fact, that the English
Government followed a policy at that time, which is now condemned by^
the very persons who were then its most decided and convinced represen-
tatives.

The reverses of the Servians have excited in Enssia a profound sentiment
of commiseration and sympathy through all classes. It is the nation itself
that is stirred this time— a new and important phenomenon. TJnU now
only the government and the diplomatists busied themselves with the
Eastern question. To-day it is the whole people from the greatest families
downwards. The Russian newspapers are filled with appeals to charity
in aid of suffering Servians and Bulgarians. At Moscow alone more ttian
six hundred almsboxcs liave been opened to receive subscriptions and gifts,
and the provincial governors, so far from placing any obstacles in the way
of the movement, actually encourage it. The national writer, Aksukoff,
well expressed the feelings that arc now animating the Russian people, in
a speech which has been widely reproduced and universally applauded.
The Eastern question, ho said, has completely changed its character. “ It
is become the Slav question, and can only bo solved by every Slav’s emanci-
pation.” It is the idea which was lately developed by tioncral Fadeoff, and
which seems to us thoroughly just. Formerly when people spoke of the
Eastern question they used to picture to themselves the great powers as all
■ eager to dispute the fragments of the Ottoman Empire ; Russia coveting
BMgaria and Constantinople ; Austria, the Danubian Principalities, Servia
and Bosnia ; England and France quarrelling for Egypt. This is still the
form in which the Eastern question presents itself to the minds of the
vulgar, and in fact, these wore the dreams of old-fashioned politicians. But
since the principle of nationalities has become the essential factor in con-
temporary events, and at the same time tlie spirit of conquest has been
repudiated by most governments, the Eastern question has completely
changed its face. Suppose they wore to offer to England, Syria, E^t,
and Crete, of which she could make herself mistress without firing
a shot. Very probably she would refuse. She gave up the Ionian
Itslands, thbugh they made an excellent post for surveying the wMe
Adriatic, and though she could have remained there for any length of time

HOME AND FOBEIGN AFFAIRS.

397

by virtue of treatiop, and without having any Eorious opposition to fear.
Austria certainly would not wish to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina ; for
when lately there was a question of it, as a way of putting an end to
existing complications, the Germans and Hungarians were unanimous in
repelling any such combination.

There remains Russia. We may suspect her of washing aggrandizement
on the side of the Balkan, but the Government and the diplomatists of
Russia disclaim any idea of the kind, and we are convinced that they do so
in all sincerity. Russia is in no position to occupy Constantinople. So
irrational an extension of territory would be for her an irremediable cause
of weakness. Militarily the position would bo untenable. Neither Austria
nor even Germany could tolerate definitely such aggrandizement of the
neighbouring Colossus, and a flank movement of the Austrian and
German armies on the line of the Danube would be enough to cut in
two the Russian Empire, so inconsiderately enlarged in this direction.
The only reasonable solution is, therefore, the successive emancipation of
the Slav populations, who are now kept in poverty and abasement by the
blind and hateful domination of the Turks. Happily, this seems to be the
point of view to which the great Powers arc now rallying.

The discussion of Eastern affairs in Parliament was as satisfactory as
could be expected, even the speech gf Lord Derby. In the House of
Commons Mr. Gladstone, and in the House of Lords Lord Granville, clearly
brought out the necessity of collective intervention with a view to putting
an end to a situation that has become intolerable. If the C'rimean war,
Mr. Gladstone observed, took away from the Christian ])opulation of
Turkey the Protectorate of Russia, it was not to hand them over in a con-
dition of helplessness to the tender mercies of their masters. For the
Russian protectorate was substituted the protection of all the powers.
Why should England shrink from the obligation she then contracted ? Are
not the Christians who now groan under the oppressive Ottoman yoke
worthy of all our sympathies ? The Mahometans are condemned to dis-
appear ; they have neither arts nor industry ; they appreciate nothing but
violent force ; each decade secs them receding before the steady advance
of the Christians. All the older champions of the Porto, and notably Lord
Stratford dc Rodcliilc, have abandoned the cause, and demand open and
energetic intervention on the part of the European powers. While we re-
spect the integrity of Ottoman territory, we must secure for the Christians
an independent and autonomous government.

Lord Granville spoke in the same sense as Mr. Gladstone. We are look-
ing on, he said, at a lamentable war which menaces Turkey with ruin, and
which intensifies animosities of race and of religion on its soil. Now it is the
Ottoman Government which is the principal cause of these misfortunes.
That Government has kept not one of the promises made by it in 1856 ; it
has executed not one of the reforms which were then recognised as abso-
lutely indispensable.

Mr. Forsyth indicated clearly enough the grounds why England should
favour the emancipation of the Servians. If you constitute them into small
autonomous states nominally subjected to the Porte, but self-governing like
Roumania and Servia, then you interpose nine millions of free men between

398

HOME AST) FOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

Bassia and Constantinople. This is the very central point of the question.
So long as people could believe that Turkey would develop new life and
strength under the influence of Western civilisation, the old English policy
was intelligible. That consisted in upholding the Ottoman Government at
all cost. But the day of these illusions is gone. The Porte is incapable of
a vigorous execution of any of the reforms which it is so ready to promise,
while Western influences precipitate Mussulman decay. It is a curious but
universal phenomenon. The races which, for one reason or another, are
unable completely to assimilate our civilisation, disappear on coming into
contact with it. In Egypt, for example, the adoption of Western ideas and
Western institutions is a cause of ruin. The conscription has enabled the
Khedive to carry on successive wars. The idea of introducing manu-
facturing industry has only ended in the erection of works that are carried
on at a loss, and that multiply the inhuman burdens imposed on the
unfortunate fellahs. Steam machines are left in the sand. The mania for
transforming Cairo into a little Paris is making the city ugly, vulgar, unin-
habitable. Mussulmans only throw over the Koran, to embrace drunkenness
and debauchery. Hallways and foreign loans have brought the Porte to
insolvency. The people in Egypt, ns in Turkey, are incomparably more
remorselessly plundered, worse used, more crushed beneath the exactions
of every kind, at the present day than under the old system. The war now
going on, and the very successes of the Turks will hasten their fall. We
shall see a new application of the principle of \a rictoribus. The
national sentiment among the Slavs will be exalted by misfortune. The
abominations committed in Bulgaria will alienate for ever that industrious
population which has hitherto been so peaceful and so submissive. The mili-
tary expenses, both actual and prospective, the devastations of war, and the
excesses of the Bashi-Bazouks, will complete the ruin of Turkey. Misery will
heighten the general disorganization, and so the Porte will be more powerless
than ever, either to govern its provinces tolerably well, or to defend itself
against an ambitious neighbour. European intervention will be more fre-
quent and more necessary, and the independence of Turkey will be virtually
at an end. It was so with the temporal power of the Pope ; it could
not subsist in the atmosphere of the nineteenth century, and oidjv' pro-
longed its existence by the support now of France now of Austria.

If, therefore, England wishes to preserve the territory of Turkey from Mus-
covite invasion — a thing in no case to be feared for the moment — she ought
to sustain, not a phantom which is rapidly disappearing, and a ruin whose
walls arc crumbling to pieces, but those Christian populations to whom be-
longs the future. We may believe that this will be henceforth the policy
of England. Lord Derby, restrained as he is by ministerial responsibilities,
has admitted that, though no doubt there are great difliculties in the
way of granting autonomy to populations which are half barbarous,
which are half Mahometan and half Christian, which have not either the
same ideas or the same interests, still these difficulties are by no means
insurmountable. It is hard to feel any confidence in the policy of the
government. Anyone who reads the Blue-books tolerably carefully — and
' we Inay refer to Mr. Hutson’s paper in the present number of this Heview
for an analysis of the case — ^must see that the English Foreign Office has

HOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS. 8&9

been signally inattentive to the evidence lying under their eyes, both as to
the condition of tlie Turkish provinces, and to the real sources of the
insurrection. The government must also, on the same testimony, have
been singularly careless, not only of the interests of the Christians, but also
of the details of their own policy.

The story of the vile atrocities committed by the Turks in Bulgaria is
now completely confirmed. Mr. Disraeli had denied them with ignoble
jocularity. Ho relied upon Sir Henry Elliot, and Sir Henry Elliot relied upon
the mendacious affirmations of the Turkish Government. Mr. Bourke had
by-and-by the humiliation of having to rise to admit that the reports of
the correspondent of the Ihdly Xeivs wei'e perfectly well founded, and that
the Prime Minister's sarcasms upon newspaper authorities were as ill-founded
as they were flippant and unbecoming. The barbarities of the conquering
Tartars have been, as the Times said, equalled, if not surpassed, in a
European country in the very middle of the nineteenth century. We should
have to go to Dahomey to find such a spectacle as the Turkish provinces
now present. It is in vain that the Turks pretend that these abominations
were only reprisals fur excesses committed by the Bulgarians. Whoever
knows the peaceful and harmless inhabitants of Bulgaria, will be convinced
that these statements are utterly false.

It is a distressing thing to say, but said it must be, that England bears a
share of responsibility for these horrors. Mr. Disraeli denies, and without
doubt correctly, that the English fleet was sent to Besika Bay with any
view to uphold the Ottoman Empire. We have told the Porte, he added,
that it ought to fulfil its obligations and change its line of conduct, and
that our fleet had for its mission to defend English interests, and not to
galvanise a power that was falling to pieces in internal decomposition.
Nevertheless, the demonstration of England had all the appearance, both
to Turkey and the rest of the world, of alliance and succour. The Turks
believed that they could count on the support of British gims. Hence
redoubled energy on their part, and as is always the case with fanatical
barbarians, redoubled energy ended in infamous atrocities. Europe became
possessed by the opinion that England is still, as in 1853, the guardian and
counsellor of Turkey. To throw off this odious responsibility, which must
assuredly lie heavily on the conscience of the English people, something else
is necessary beside words, or even the nomination of an English conspl at
Philippopolis, or the despatch of a military attache to the Turkish quarters.
England will have to take in hand the cause of the Christians, who are thus
heavily oppressed by their masters, and especially the unfortunate Bulgarians.
It is indispensable that she should make herself the protectress of those un-
happy subjects of the Turks ; for the Turks, if allowed to regard themselves
as really victorious, will know no moderation, except such as is enforced
upon them. The worst fault that England could commit would be to let
the Christian populations of the East suppose that Russia is their pro-
tector and England their enemy. Who in the eyes of Europe is now
playing the higher part, — Russia who defends the rights of the victims, or
England who seems to range herself on the side of their destroyers ? No
doubt the English Government may oppose the violent partition of Turkey,
of which for that matter there is at present no question ; but her duty, if

400 HOME AND FOHEIGN AFFAIIIS.

she does not wish to appear before history as answerable for the massacres
in Bnlgaria, is undoubtedly to place herself at the head of those who claim
the emancipation of the Christian subjects of Turkey. If the Government
fails to understand its duty, the English nation will surely compel them to
it. It was too much, fifteen years ago, that the English Government^ at the
time of the war of secession in the United States, should have leaned towards
the slaveholders. Let her not now give to the world the moral scandal
of defending or seeming to defend the cause of the monsters in Bulgaria.

It is all the more necessary for England to take in hand the cause of
humanity — because the Gormans and Hungarians in Austria take up a more
hostile attitude towards the Servians. They perceived that the massacres
committed by the Bashi-Bazouks ended in putting a stop to all resistance in
Bulgaria. If the Turks, being victorious in Servia, pursue, as they are said
to bo doing, a plan of summary executions, all the Slavs of the Balkan penin-
sula will be as the Hungarians think terrorised and struck down, and the danger
of seeing little autonomous Slav States flourishing and strong, will then dis-
appear. The Hungarian and Austrian newspapers cynically avow that such
is their desire. It is to be hoped that the Vienna Cabinet will not follow
this hateful policy, but that it will join the other Powers in bringing about
a serious amelioration of the condition of the Bayahs.

The attitude of the Vatican in these affairs deserves to be pointed out.
It shows us once more the Papacy sacrificing the cause of Christianity and
civilisation to its own aims of universal domination. It is also a new
example of the power that is still preserved by an institution, which people
used to suppose must fall to pieces with the loss of its temporalities. The
Pope is no longer a sovereign ; he has no longer either territory or army ;
but he commands an innumerable host of the faithful ; and so everywhere,
not only in Catholic countries, but also in Protestant or schismatical
countries^ as in America, England, and Eussia, he is able at a given
moment to exercise a marked influence upon the course of events.
The two principal organs of the papal court, the Voce della Verita^ and the
Oaserratore llnmmm, have pronounced for Turkey, and they reproach the
Liberals for ranging themselves to-day on the side of that very Eussia
which they attacked so bitterly so short a time ago. Obeying a watchword
from Eomc, the Catholic Slavs of Herzegovina and Bosnia have abandoned
the cause of their nationality and freedom, to range themselves on the side
of their Turkish masters, who will treat them no better than the others
after their power is restored. We see thus throughout the whole world
the Catholics persuaded to place the interests of Eome above the interests
of their country. But why does the successor of St. Peter stretch out a
hand to the successor of Mahomet ? Why docs the holy see which once
impelled Europe upon Asia, and preached a crusade against the
crescent, now aid the Mahometans in keeping the oppressed
Christians under the yoke ? Simply from ambition. The former
Turkish Government had expelled the Bishop Hassoun from the empire.
He had caused confusion within the fold of the Armenian community, and
the ministers of Abdul Aziz supported the Armenian faction, who refused
to. recognise the authority of the Pope. A bargain was struck. The

HO^E AND EOBEIGN AFFAIRS.

401

Turkish Govornmont onnal the decree of expulsion against Hassoun, and
in exchange for this the Pope has given orders to the Bosnian Catholics
not to favour the insurrection, and, if need be, to go to the aid of the
Turks. This is what they have conscientiously done, and quite recently
they protested in loud tones, in a document addressed to the great powers,
against all projects of annexation to Servia.

The Session in France has come to an end in a way that satisfies every-
body except the Ultramontancs ; they are only to be satisfied by the
return of Henry the Fifth to the throne, and the restoration to the Pope of
provinces which he did not know how to govern. The Senate amended the
Act on the Mayors by extending the right of governmental appointment,
and the Chamber of Deputies had the good sense for the sake of avoiding
a conflict, to accept an alteration which they did not approve. The recon-
ciliation between the Senate and the Ministry was brought about in a
striking way. M. Dufaurc, the chief of the Cabinet, was elected senator
for life by 161 votes against lOQ which were given for M. Chesnelong.
This time the Centre voted with the llepublicans, and the Eights were
defeated. Up to the last moment they hoped to win the seat by a coalition
of Tjegitimists, Bouupartists, and Orleanists of the fusion. But M. Chesno-
loug is the particular friend of the Comte do Chambord and the Pope, and
the special representative of Ultramontanism ; and many senators who bad
voted against M. Waddingtou’s University Bill, were still not inclined to give
their vote for so pronounced a cloiical partisan. After the election the
two Chambers adjourned for the recess. The close of the Session was
aiiuouiiccd by the chief of the Cabinet, without any Presidential message.
Ill fact the President had nothing special to communicate to the nation,
and Marshal Macmahon, like President Grant, has the merit of knowing
when to bo silent in season. Ho takes republican institutions au serieux,
which is not a ver}^ common thing among French Conservatiyos. The trials
of now institutions has succeeded better than even their most eager sup-
])ortors had ventured to hope. It is worth noticing as a good omen for the
good cause, that so far as the recent elections have gone for the Presidents
of the Councils-Gcneral — which would correspond to our Quarter Sessions,
if the Quarter Sessions were what they ought to be, sittings of elective
county boards — thirty-nine out of seventy elected ore Republican, twenty-
one Monarchists, and ten Bonapartists. As wo have said so often, all this is duo
to the moderating influence of M. Gambetta. The impatient group directed
by M. Louis Blanc is following a roally deplorable policy, by insisting on
precipitating the advance.

The speech made at the Sorbonne by M. Waddington, the Minister of
Public Instruction, at the distribution of prizes for the Paris schools, was
an event of much significance. It was the first time of so public a salutation
being paid to the Republic by a cabinet minister. M. Waddington's
words were received with transports of enthusiasm by his audience, and
have been praised since by the whole liberal press in the country.
Thp great success of M. Waddington is due to the fact that with a firmness
unknown to his predecessors, he unfurls the flag of lay science and the
emancipation of human intelligence — that great cause which is being fought

402

HOME AND rOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

in France against aii implacable enemy. It was liberal France thus saluting
a man who did not shrink from doing battle with the clergy with the only
weapon that ensure their defeat — knowledge and enlightenment. M.
Marcere, who holds the most important office in a French administration,
that of Minister for Home Affairs, has also made a speech as remarkable as
that of his colleague at the Education department, both for its political good
sense, and for its clear-toned adherence to the Republic.

Germany is beginning to prepare for the approaching elections. For
some time people spoke of a change of attitude in the domestic policy of
Prince Bismarck. He was going to break, they said, with the Liberals, and
draw closer to his old friends the Conservatives and the Junkers. Bo far,
there is no active evidence in confirmation of this rumour. Only the
Provinzial CorrespomienZi obeying, as is alleged, the inspiration of Count
Eulenburg, the Minister of the Intenor, started a campaign to detach
the National Liberals from the Fortschritt-Partci, endeavouring to rally the
first to itself by definitely repudiating the second. The Provinzial Com-
ftpoiulenz has not gained its end. All the organs of the National Liberal
party repulsed the advance, and distinctly declared that they would never
abandon the men of the Fortschritt-Partei, who were pursuing the same
ends as themselves, and from whom they arc only separated by mere
differences of shade. The unity of the Liberal party is thus made clearer
than it was before, and this is an excellent sign for the approaching elec-
tions. For the Prussian Ministry to change its direction, it will be neces-
sary in the first place to get rid of Dr. Falk, who represents the struggle
against Ultramontanism, sind is the champion of the ideas of progress.
Now Dr. Falk, passing some days ago through Augsburg, was compli-
mented there by a Liberal deputation of the town, who expressed their
gratitude for the energy he had shown in resisting Ultramontane preten-
sions. In replying, the minister said that all the rumours recently set
afloat as to a change of system in Prussian policy and as to his own retire-
ment, were pure inventions. On this subject, the correspondent of a German
newspaper reports a significant conversation with Prince Bismarck. Daring
his stay at Eissingen ho had invited a member of the Diet, Herr Jung, to
dine with him. The conversation turned on the now Conservative party
said to be in course of formation. The Prince declared that he could not
ally himself with such a party, because there would bo at its head men
whose policy in ecclesiastical affairs would force him to separate from Herr
Falk, the representative of the Kulturkampf. Prince Bismarck added
that he would never sacrifice the rights of the State to the spirit of domina-
tion in the Catholic clergy. The contest seems to be losing its intensity,
because the resistance and provocations on the part of the clergy are less
violent ; but the Chancellor has gone too far in the battle to be able to
withdraw.

At Westminster there were rumours towards the end of the session of the
rise of some kind of organization among the Liberals who sit below the gang-
way. 'If this means the formation of a Third Party, it is at least premature,
and it will perhaps never be realised at any future time. What has really

HOME AND FOBEIGN AFFAIRS.

408

been done is due to the growth of a strong opinion of the advantages of con-
nected action among the group of members who are called the Extreme Left.
To apply the classification of French parties to those of our own country is
thorougUy misleading, for there is no such division among politicians in
England as the gulf that separates Bight from Left at Versailles — except
possibly the separation between the Irish Home Buie members and the rest
of the House. The group of members who have come to an informal
understanding to act with a certain concert, have far more points of agree-
ment, than points of difference, with the official Liberals on the front bench.
In truth there is, we believe, no question — ^not even the Disestablishment
of the Church itself-->on which the dispute between the Whig and the
Badical is more than a question of time. The Badical believes that opinion
is already ripe for measures which the Whig thinks the country not yet pre-
pared for ; but the Badical asks for nothing which the Whig is not ready to
accept, after he has been persuaded that the constituencies wish for it or
assent to it. It is therefore the business of the Liberal who has faith in the
possibilities of improving government, and who has measures in his mind
which he believes likely to promote that improvement, to bring the rest of
the party round to his own opinion.

The Opposition contains two chief groups : those who have made up their
minds that the programme of great improvements is exhausted for some,
perhaps for many, years to come : and, on the other hand, those who
reject this complacent repose with all their hearts. The leaders nearly all
at present are in the former of these two classes. The exhausting labours
of legislation between 1868 and 1878 still weigh on their jaded spirits. They
have no appetite even for power, if it is to be won by the laborious applica-
tion of their minds to new problems and the device and enforcement of new
problems. On all the serious questions, again, which are sure to force
themselves to the front with the next tide of political interest in the country,
the former leaders are divided. Lord Hartington is with us in the matter
of education, and is not against us as to Disestablishment, but he is averse
to a further extension of the franchise. Mr. Forster is a reactionist and the
great buttress of reactionary ideas about national education, but he is a
liberal as to the franchise and probably as to the land, while he has never
committed himself against Disestablishment. Mr. Lowe, we are sorry to
think, is cold to all the subjects we have named, but would work heartily
^for law reform, and any changes in the direction of more scientific adminis-
tration — ^both of them matters of immense importance, and matters on vribioh
there is room for the most valuable improvements. Of Mr. Gladstone who
can speak ?

This being the state of liberalism among the Olympians of the front
bench, it is high time, if there be any political energy and political courage
alive in the country, that those members of the House of Commons who
agree in their general views of the direction of improved government should
endeavour to secure an effective influence over the rest of the party. This
can only be done by union for parliamentary purposes ; by putting an end
to a discouraging isolation ; by lending to each the support of all. There
IS nothing to be gained by a breach with the Whigs ; there is everything to

VOL. XX, K.S. E E

404

HOME AND EOBEIGN AEFAIES.

be gained by oonvincing the Whigs that, if they 'wish for the support of the
Badieals, they must at least listen to what the Radicals have to say, and no
longer consider them as an inorganic group of men, each riding a hobby of
his own. A measure that is only a hobby when in the hands of one man
fighting for his own hand, takes its place in serious politics when it is>
known to be brought forward in concert with sixty or seventy other
members, who are deliberately in the habit of acting together. There is
no insult to Whig sincerity in this feeling. The true Whig doctrine is
that to carry out what the country wishes, whatever that may be, is the
business of the legislature. The Badieals say no more.

One argument of those who urge a more effective union among the active
Liberals, is that only on condition of such habitual concert do you surround
a man with that bracing and stimulating atmosphere which makes political
responsibility more seriously felt and more cheerfully accepted. Close
co-operation with others encourages an energetic interest in questions that
would otherwise be neglected or only languidly attended to ; it makes the
promoter of a measure more confident for one thing, and more in earnest in
mastering it, for another. Take, for example, the group of Bills or Resolu-
tions of which notice was given at the end of the session by the members
who recognise the value of. connected action. They comprise the following
subjects : — 1. The construction of representative boards for the administra-
tion of counties. 2. The revision of the incidence of taxation, with a view to an
arrangement more equitable towards the poorer classes. 8. The exercise
of the power of summary jurisdiction, and the system of appointing and
controlling magistrates. 4. The practices and regulations connected with
voting, with a view to making the franchise more real. 5. Tenant right
and game laws.

Not all the measures referred to under these headings are of capital import-
ance, but it will be observed that each of them opens up an approach to one of
three great fields of legislative improvement — namely, the Land system, Taxa-
tion, and the extension and increased efficiency of Popular Bepresentation.
Well, the fact that A. and B. are both members of a single group will make
each of them more wiUing to take a deeper and more real interest in the
question of the other. A. will take pains to master B.’s subject, in order to
be able to support him in debate. One of the great evils of the present
condition of the House of Commons is that if a member has **got a
question,” and follows the party whip, then he has fulfilled the whole duty
of a member of Parliament. But anybody who undertakes to work with others
will naturally be led to work at other questions besides that in which he is
specially interested. One of the chief objects of such a union will be to
make sure of having the most efficient debate possible upon the various
8nl|jects of the programme. This is only attainable on condition that
the union can supply the mover with a sufficient number of competent
backers, and obviously the only competent backer is one who has studied
the arguments and ideas of the subject in detail.

It is perhaps not too presumptuous for an outside observer to remark
ihrae main deficiencies in the daily work of the House of Commons ; first,
WUI ef politioBl courage ; second, want of vigilance ; third, want of ampler

HOME AMD FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

40S

knowledge more widely diffnsed. Take sneh a measure as the Day Indus-
trial-School Clause of ihe new Education Act. When a child keeps com-
pany with rogues or vagabonds or is out of proper control, and the parent
satisfies the Court that he cannot make the child go to school, then the
child may be sent to a day industrial school. Bight or wrong, this is one
of the most socialistic thmgs ever done. Yet if you turn to Hansard, you
see that the most radically innovating feature in the Act was hardly dis-
cussed at all. Well, this shows either want of vigilance or want of know-
ledge, or else it shows both. If the House of Commons is good for any-
thing at all, it ought not to have passed this without the most careful ex-
amination. Now the effect of consent among a body of men — ^however
modest in numbers, yet — thoroughly in earnest, would be to prevent such
pretermissions as this. Courage be increased by the co-operation of
men who want something, against men who only want to remain quiet ; the
probabilities of vigilance will be multiplied with the number of members
interested; the diffusion of accurate political knowledge will accompany
anything like a collective programme, for which all its supporters will have
to be prepared to do battle.

There are a great many things to be said against party government, but
evils of a new kind arise, if one of the two part^l,» so disorganized as hardly
to be a party. We have no great faith in the magic virtues of artificial
organization, but we have very firm faith indeed in the virtues of a habit of
co-operation. No doubt mere co-operation will not serve in the stead of
right ideas, or new and original applications of accepted principle ; it will not
do the work of the political thinker. But there are many improvements worth
carrying, which are only waiting for parliamentary force. And the first
step to this augmentation of parliamentary force, whether inside the House
or outside, is to collect the men who have the most vivid belief in a better
form of national life, into a united group. It is possible that the cohesive
force of the new alliance may prove too weak, as the programme becomes
more far-reaching. Meanwhile, the union is sure to do some good, and we
do not see how it can do any mischief, except to those who seek nothing
beyond turning out the Ministry, and sitting in their scats with nothing
better than their policy.

The most important incident of the closing days of the session, was a
strong deputation to Lord Hartington to urge a more vigorous protest
against the Education Bill than had yet been made. If, as is believed,
t^ was originated by some of the more active members of the new Liberal
union, it is a sign that they really understand the feeling of the party in
the country, and that they have behind them the solid strength of the
liberal portion of tho great constituencies. The deputation was one of
the strongest and most widely representative that has gone to any
minister since 1870. It was not the Birmingham League, but English
liberalism. Official delegates came from the political organizations of every
leading town in the provinces, and they were all agreed to press tho
fundamental principle that underlies our own objections to the educational
legislation of the last six years — ^namely, the indispensableness of only

2 s s

4M HOKE Aim POBEIGN AFFAIBS.

giving public money to the support of institutions in whose managing body
the public is represented. Lord Hartington agreed to move a resolution,
which he afterwards made stronger in compliance with the wishes of
certain leaders of the deputation, and which laid down in terms the pro-
priety of public representation accompanying the grant of public money.
This resolution was supported by a party vote, and those, therefore, who
like ourselves have always advocated tiiis principle, can no longer be
decently charged with being a mere faction. Our views are those of the
party, and it is now Mr. Forster who is the organ of a faction. But even
Mr. Forster, after declining to follow his leader and to accompany his party
into the lobby against the government Bill, announced with an awkward
melancholy, that for the future ho should hold himself free to take a new
line in the question. What Mr. Forster’s line may ultimately prove to be,
is now of no great concern. He was quite honest in refusing to vote
against Lord Sandon. Lord Sandon had simply followed Mr. Forster’s
own lines. Lord Sandon’s policy is Mr. Forster’s policy written in capital
letters. When the Liberals return to office, one of their first tasks will
be to extinguish the system which Mr. Forster and Lord Sandon between
them have consolidated. That system means two things : (1) the main-
tenance out of public funds of privately managed schools ; (2) the compul-
sion on a parent to send his children to schools in whose management he
neither has, nor can have, a direct or indirect voice. Both these conditions are
inconsistent with the right position of national instruction, as a function in
which every good citizen should be expected to take an interest. This
political view of national education — ^as a part of civil duty and public
interest and obligation — ^is that on which Liberals will learn to insist. Not
that it will efface the objection to the system of Lord Sandon and Mr.
Forster from the point of view of the Dissenter’s conscience. It shows a
very shallow knowledge of English character to suppose that the Dissenter
will patiently see his child driven by law into a school paid for by public
money, but managed exclusively by the man who denounces the Dissenter’s
religion every other Sunday from the parish pulpit. But this is only one
aspect of the system of educating our people through the sects. However
weakened the Dissenters may be electorally, their very just grievance hap-
pens to fit in with a view of national life, and of the share of education in it,
which is now one of the tests between Liberalism and Obscurantism.

We may make a remark on what the sectarian party think a very acute
stroke of policy. The old Twenty-fifth Section enabled School Boards to
pay the fees of indigent children in sectarian schools. The corresponding
section of Lord Sandon’s new Act compels Boards of Guardians to pay
such fees where the parent chooses a sectarian school. Now take the case
of an indigent Catholic parent, whose priest persuades him to ask for his
child’s pence for the Catholic school. He goes to the School Board. They
say : We cannot pay your fees in the school of St. Januarius : if you like
to send your child to a Board School, we can r&nit under Section 17 of
Act of 1870. If you insist on St. Januarius, you must go to the Guardians ;
thqr ca4 ^ye you the money ; we cannot.” That is to say, the parent
who seeks money for the sake of sending his child to a sectarian school, will

HOME AND POBEIQN AFFAIBS.

407

have to go before the body whom he thoroughly dislikes, trom whom he
will have neither sectarian nor educational sympathy, and whose inquisition
into his circumstances will be much stiffer than has been customary among
School Boards. He will, therefore, be very likely to be content to have
the fees remitted for his child in the Board School, instead of taking
the trouble to persuade the guardians to pay the fees for a sectarian school.
In that case, the amendment which was pressed upon the government
by the Catholics and by the hotter of their own clericalists, will have the
directly opposite effect to that which was anticipated.

It cannot continue to be endured for ever, nor for very long, that schools
which have no voluntary support and are entirely maintained by the children’s
pence and the government grants, shall be exclusively in the hands of
private and irresponsible managers. On the other hand it may seem too
harsh a thing — however strong the Liberal feeling may by-and-by grow to
be in the country — ^to withdraw the grants from all the sectarian schools,
though there would be nothing really inequitable in such a measure. The
final solution of the question will probably take some such shape as the
withdrawal of all government aid or recognition from schools whose managing
bodies do not contain an element of public representation. This change
will be the result of the spontaneous agitation that is sure to grow up in
the course of the administration of the new Act.

One other observation ought to be made upon Lord Sandon’s Act. K
you are going to throw public duties of an entirely new kind upon Boards
of Guardians, then you ought to reconstruct the system under which
Boards of Guardians are elected. That is the next thing to be done. At
present, the elective power for such Boards and the number of ex officio
members upon them, combine to make them merely the representatives of
property. But if they are to mix in the most intimate affairs of the poor
(not paupers, mark, under the Education Act), they must be made to
represent the poor as well as the rich.

The removal of our great parliamentary mime from the Lower to the
Upper House is the best thing that has happened to the House of Commons
for some years. Life may be less entertaining in that costly Club, but it
will be more edifying for those who do not take the Club view. The change
will do more than anythmg else could have done to clear the moral air of the
House. The very presence in a serious body of a solemn farqeur, if he be
a farqeur of genius and authority, is demoralising. To see the very genius
and incarnation of Irony in the highest political seat, withers the political
conscience. Mephistopheles has a deadly fascination. His wit, his swift,
ghastly glimpses into the hollowness of things, his subtle art in varnishing his
own motives and tarnishing the motives of other people, his superb contempts,
are awful gifts in the eyes of the country squire and the cotton-spinner.
They set a bad fashion, and they make a mischievous example. Even on
the front Opposition bench, Mr. Disraeli is said to have inspired able
rhetoricians with the singular ambition of being that curious character, the
mimic of a mime. Certainly the success has been so striking, that it is not
surprising if it excites emulation. It is true that English Tories have been

408

HOME ASD POBEION AFFAIBS.

led before now by such a man as Bolingbroke ; but then Bolmgbroke,^after
all, though a freethinker and a political charlatan, was still of good English
family. We are inclined to envy the next generation, for they will be
able to see it in all its wonder. We are too near. Under the robes of
the ennobled party chief of 1876, we cannot help seeing the humble party
bravo of 1846.

By an astonishing stroke, the Prime Minister has chosen for his title the
very title of all others that is best fitted to shrivel up his pretensions, if the
English world only knew what it ought to know of its greatest men. The
last commoner who was made an earl as head of an administration was
Chatham. Beaconsfield was the residence of Edmund Burke, and the patent
was actually in course of preparation, raismg him to the peerage as Lord
Beaconsfield. Mr. Disraeli is hardly one of those sublime mockers who
carry their spirit so far as to mock themselves. Yet can he be serious in
daring to associate his career with the name of that groat man ? It is true
that his race has had, with all its gifts, little sense of taste in decoration,
from Solomon in all his glory downwards. The most insignificant of that race
thinks no clothing and no jewellery too gorgeous to be becoming. Yet it is
rather more than one can bear, that the man who entered life as the bravo
of the Protectionists, should trick himself out as a successor to the title of
the author of the Thoughts on Scarcitg. It is in the law of things that the
wicked shall fiourish as the green bay-tree ; but why should the man whose
last words in the House of Commons were a plea for the authors of massacre
and oppression in Turkey, try to associate his name with the memory of the
man who gave fourteen of the best years of his life to punish the oppressor
of the natives of India ? It is excellent, no doubt, to bo a wit, to be an
epigrammatist, to have the secret of pithy phrase, but what has the
artificer of these flashy things to do with the man whose lofty spirit, whose
weighty judgment, whose magnanimous aims, whose imperial under-
standing, gave him such majestic authority over our English speech?
How laughable it is! The man, however, who is Lord Beaconsfield has
knowledge and arts, that were not possessed by the man who only was to
have been Lord Beaconsfield. He knows men, and he despises them. And
nobody living has much better reason, if we contrast the contempt and
abuse showered upon Mr. Di&raeli with the blind adulation that is now
offered up by the very same journals to the same man and the same character
under his more exalted name.

Aug. 28 , 1876 .

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW

No. CXVIII. New Seeies.— Octobeh 1, 1876.

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

Yj:ars instead of months seem to have passed since, in last
Dcccmher, I wrote in this Review under the heading “ The True
Eastern Question.” A revolt against Turkish oppression was then
going on in Rosniii and Ilerzegovina, a revolt which shewed to
all who kept their eyes open that Ihe long-oppressed Slavonic
subjects of the Turk had fully made up their minds to throw off his
yoke once and for ever. To those who had eyes to sec, the insurrec-
tion which began last summer marked the beginning of an acra in
the history of the world. It marked that the wicked power of the
Turk was doomed. From the stern determination with which the
insurgents drew the sword, from the deep and universal sympathy
with their cause among their free neighbours of the same blood and
speech, it was plain that tliis revolt was no mere local or casual
disturbance, but the beginning of a great uprising of a mighty
people. It was plain that a ball had been sent rolling which would
grow as it rolled ; it wiis plain that a storm had burst which must
in the end sweep away before it the foul fabric of oppression which
European diplomatists had been so long vainly and wickedly
striving to prop up. When I wrote in December last, as when I
wrote on these matters twenty years back, I wrote as one of a small
band, maintaining an unpopular view. We looked for no general
approval ; we were rejoiced if wo could find so much as a stray
listener here and there. The cause Avhich I had then in hand was
one which Governments pooh-poohed and about which the world in
general was careless. I then set forth, as I had often set forth
before, as I do not doubt that I shall often have to set forth again,
the true nature of Ottoman rule, the causes which make it hopeless
to look for any reform in Ottoman rule, the one remedy by which
only the evils of Ottoman rule can be got rid of — ^by getting rid of
the Ottoman rule itself. In that article, I pleaded for the oppressed
Christian ; but I also bore in mind the danger lost, in delivering the

VOL. XX. N.S. F F

410 PBS6ENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTEBH QTJE8TIOH.

oppressed Ghristian, a way miglit be opened for the oppression of
the Mussulman. I said then that the direct rule of the Turk
must cease in every land whose inhabitants had risen against his
rule. I said that^ as Bosnia and Herzegovinia had risen, his rule
must at once cease in Bosnia and Herzegovina ; that when Albania
and Bulgaria should rise, his rule must cease in Albania and
Bulgaria also. I said that the least that could be accepted was the
practical setting free of the revolted lands by making them tributary
states like Servia and lloiimania. But I also proposed, in the*
special interest of the large Mahometan minority in Bosnia, that
that particular province should be annexed to the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, as a power strong enough to hinder the professors of
either religion from doing any wrong to the professors of tho
other. When I said this, there was still only a local warfare
in two provinces, a warfare waged by the people of thosa
provinces, goaded to revolt by intolerable wrongs, and strength-
ened onl}’' by private volunteers from the lands immediately
around them. It was not till several months later that there
was any Bulgarian insurrection, any national war on the part of
Servia and Montenegro. Meanwhile the Turk was engaged in hi&
usual work of putting forth lying promises, promises in which the
men who had risen against him were far too wise to put trust for a
moment. Meanwhile diplomatists were engaged in their usual
work of pooh-poohing the great events whoso greatness they could
not understand. They w^ere busy with their usual nostrums,
their petty palliatives, their Andrassy Notes and their Berlin
Memorandums. Feeble attempts indeed to stop the torrent were
their proposals for this and that reform, for this and that guaranty.
Such were the sops which they thought might be swallowed either
by the tyrant whose one object was to get back his victims into his
clutches, or by the men who had sworn to die rather than again
bow their necks under his yoke. While diplomatists were wondering
and pottering, men were acting. Servia and Montenegro at last
came openly to the help of their brethren, and helpless ambassadors
and foreign secretaries found themselves face to face with a national
war and no longer with a local insurrection. And meanwhile, if
men had been acting, fiends had been acting also. Bulgaria rose ;
how its rising was put down the world knows, in spite of the self-
made Farl of Beaconsfield. And, when the world knew, the world
shuddered and the world spoke. It had been hard to call public
attention to what seemed to many merely a petty strife in lands
whose names they had hardly heard. The old traditions also had
to be struggled with. EngUshmen had to be taught what their
dear ally the Turk was, what he had ever been, what he ever must
be. The ^^Bussian hobgoblin’’ had to be laid, and with many

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

411 '

minds it was hard work to lay it. For months and months
the few who had their eyes open were still preaching in the wilder-
ness. At last the Turk did our work for us. He told a
shuddering world what ho really was in words stronger than any
that we could put together. He painted his own picture on the
bloody fields of Bulgaria in clearer colours than we could over have
painted it. The common heart of mankind was stirred. We who
had before been preaching in the wilderness found a hearing in
market-places and in council-chambers. What wo had whispered in
the ear in closets was now preached on the house-tops by a mighty
company of preachers. Great statesmen put forth with voice and
pen the same facts, the same arguments, for which, nine months
before, it was hard to get a hearing. All England spoke with one
voice, a voice which spoke in the same tones in every corner of the
land save tAvo. It was only from the beer-shops of Oxford and the
Foreign Office at Westminster that discordant notes came up.
While the rest of England was speaking the words of truth and
righteousness. Lord Derby was still putting forth fallacies, while his
Oxford admirers raised an inarticulate howl which Avas not more un-
reasonable than the fallacies of their chief. Those who, in season
and out of season, have fought this battle for twenty years and
more, maj^ perhtips be indulged in a little feeling of triumph when
they see that the world has at last come round to their side. England,
so long the abettor of the Turk, has at last found out what the Turk
is. The nation has aAvakened from its slumber ; it has cast away its
fetters ; it has dared to open its eyes and to use its reason ; it has
declared as one man that England will no longer haA^e a share in
maintaining that foul fabric of ivrong, that Englishmen will put up
with nothing short of the deliverance of the brethren against
whom they have, as a nation, so deeply sinned.

The people of England have spoken ; but it is not enough that the
people should speak. Their rulers must be made to act ; and just
now we have rulers whom it is very hard to goad to action — at all
events to action on behalf of right. The Times says that Lord Derby
must be educated,’^ and it even implies that the work of his
^‘education” has already begun. The process seems likely to
be a slow one. When the proposal was laid before him that the
revolted lands should be set free from the rule of the Turk, he said
that he had no objection to such an arrangement, but that there were
difficulties.” Of course there are difficulties in the way of so doing,
as in the way of everything else. The world is full of difficulties.
Human life chiefly consists in meeting with difficulties, and in yield-
ing to them or overcoming them as the case may happen. Only with
men the existence of difficulties is something which stirs them up to
grapple with the difficulties and to overcome them ; with diplomatists

F F 2

412

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

the existence of difficulties is thought reason enough for drawing
back and doing nothing. And there is one difficulty above all
difficulties in the way of vigorous and righteous action on the part
of England in this matter. That difficulty is the existence of Lord
Beaconsfield and Lord Derby. Lord Beaconsfield we all know ;
Lord Derby most of us are beginning to know. A few zealous
county members still express their confidence in him: but they
express it in that peculiar tone which men put on when they are
trying to persuade themselves that they still put confidence in some-
thing in which they have really ceased to put confidence. But with
the world in general the strange superstition that Lord Derby is a
great and \idse statesman is swiftly and oi^cnly crumbling away. It
is wonderful indeed to see the change of public opinion on this head.
Two or three months back it was the acknowledged creed of Liberals
as w'ell as of Conservatives that Lord Derby was to be treated with
a degree of respect with 'Nvhich there was no need to treat any of his
colleagues. Things arc indeed changed now that the talks of

educating him, now that the comic papers jeer at him, now that his
name is spoken of, certainly not with any great respect, in writing
and in speech throughout the whole land. The sagacious minister,
respected on both sides, trusted on both sides, is no longer spoken of
with the bated breath which was held to be the right thing even
when the present year was a good deal advanced. When the
English people are driven really to look into any matter, their sight
is sharp enough, and they can see that a man whose one object is to
do nothing is not the right man to be at the helm w’hen there is
a great work to be done. For my own part, if iny own opinion of
Lord Derby has changed, it has rather changed for the better. I
am beginning to think that a man whom I had for ton years looked on
as wicked may perhaps after all have been only stupid. It is a fact,
and a very ugly fact, that we have to look to the betrayer of Crete
for the redress of the wrongs of Bulgaria. A good deal of jpduca-
tion will certainly be needed before we can make such an instrument
serve our purpose. But, as regards the man himself, his treatment
of the whole matter since the summer of last year suggests the
thought that, even in the Cretan business, Lord Derby may have been
aimply frightened and puzzled, and may not have meant any active
mischief. But the mischief was done all the same ; it may have
been only in fright and puzzlcdom that he gave the order ; but the
order was given none the less ; the women and children of Crete
were none the less left, and left by his bidding, to the mercy of their
Turkish destroyers. Lord Derby, in the face of one of the great
epochs of the world’s history, reminds one of nothing so much as the
Lord Mayor before whom Jeffreys was brought after the flight of
James the Second. “ The Mayor,” says Lord Macaulay, “ was a

PBBSENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

418

Bunple man who had spent his whole life in obscurity, and was
bewildered by finding himself an important actor in a mighty
revolution.” Lord Derby had not passed his whole life in obscurity ;
but he seemed just as much bewildered at finding that he had to play
a part in a groat European crisis as ever the simple Mayor could have
been. The result in the two cases is indeed different. The Lord
Mayor, being doubtless an impulsive man, “ fell into fits and was
carried to his bed, whence he never rose.” Lord Derby is not impul-
sive ; so ho boro up, and made speeches for Mr. Gladstone to tear
into shreds.

From the first to the last utterance of Lord Derby on these
matters, from his dispatch of August 12, 1875, to his speech of
September 11, 1876, the same characteristic reigns throughout.
That characteristic is blindness. In the first dispatch and in the
last speech there is <hc same incapacity to understand what it is that
is going on. On August 12, 1875, the insurrection had been at work
for more than a month, and Consul Holms and Sir Henry Elliot had
been sending home accounts, not of course of what really had
happened, but of wljat this and that Turk told them had happened.
The Turks were of course busy lying, and Safvet Pasha was lying
with greater vigour than all the rest ; for he was saying that some
Turk — who w^as scut for the purpose of bamboozling men wiio would
not be bamboozled — -^vould ‘‘redress well-founded complaints.” But
tliis Turk had clearer notions of what was going on than Lord Derby
had. He writes to say lliat the insurrection is daily assuming more
serious proportions, tliat Dalmatia sympathizes and helps, that
Dalmatians and Montenegrins join the patriot ranks, that the
position of the Servian array looks awkw'ard, that neither Austria
nor Montenegro is acting exactly as the interests of Turkish tyranny
would have them act. That is to say, the die had been cast ; Eastern
Europe had risen ; warning had been given to the foul despot at the
New Home that the hour of vengeance was come. The Turk saw
and trembled ; Lord Derby shut liis eyes and pottered. All that he
could see w\as a local disturbance in Herzegovina. So when the
first little band of the followers of Mahomet drew the sword, the
ruler of Homo and I^ersia saw nothing but disturbances in a distant
corner of Arabia. In Lord Derby’s eyes all that was to be done was
to stop disturbances, to hinder Servians, Montenegrins, and Dalma-
tians from joining in the disturbances. Then come the memorable
words, —

“Her Majesty’s Governincnt are of opinion that the Turkish Govornmont
should roly on their own resources to suppress the insurrection, and should
deal with it as a local outbreak of disorder, rather than give international
importance to it by appealing for support to other powers.” » ^

Poor blind diplomatist ! So Leo the Tenth looked calmly on the

414

FHE6ENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTEEN QUESTION.

theologioal disorder whicli began with the teaching of a despised
monk called Martin Luther. So Antiochos of Syria and PhiUp of
Spain thought for a moment that not much could come of the local
disorders which were stirred up by the Maccabees and tho Silent
Prince. In Lord Derby’s eyes the glorious uprising of oppressed
nations was simply a thing to be suppressed.” He wished it to be
suppressed ; he thought that it could be suppressed, he would fain
have seen the tyrant again press his yoke upon his victims, without
seeking the support of other powers. Tho very phrase shewed that
Lord Derby did not shrink from the possibility that the tyrant might
be aided by other powers in his work of evil. What is meant by a
Turkish government “ suppressing a revolt by its own resources ”
we know full well now. Lord Derby himself, in spite of manful
efforts to remain in ignorance, must himself know by this time. I will
not believe that Lord Derby really wished Herzegovina to be dealt
with then as Bulgaria has been dealt with since. But that is the
literal meaning of his words, when he hopes that the revolt may be
put down by the resources of the Turkish Government. Lord Derby
could not tell then what was to happen in Bulgaria months after-
wards ; but, if he ever turned a page of modern history, if the man
who talks thus calmly of Turkish suppression of insurrections had
read the annals of tho Turk even in our own century, he might have
known what Turks have done in suppressing insurrections, and even
in dealing with lands where there had been no insurrections. He had
the same chance as other men of reading the bloody annals of
Chios and Cyprus and Kassandra. Whether Lord Derby knew it or
not, it was to the doom which had fallen on Chios and Cyprus and
Kassandra, to the doom which was to fall on Bulgaria, that Lord
Derby calmly sentenced the patriots of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Let the insurrection be suppressed — that is, in plain words, let every
foul deed of malignant fiends be wrought through the length and
breadth of the revolted lands ; — then there would be no difficulties,
no complications, no openings of the Eastern Question ; the Turk
would have his way ; the Foreign Office need not be troubled, and
the Foreign Secretary of England might safely slumber at his post.

But so it was not to be. The hopes of Lord Derby were doomed
to be disappointed. To suppress the insurrection was not quite so
easy a matter as he had deemed and hoped. The mighty out-
burst of freedom was soon to put on “international impor-
tance,” even in the eyes of diplomatists. The resources of the
Turkish Government failed to put out the fire which had been
kindled. The men who had drawn the sword for right and freedom
were not to be overthrown in a moment, oven though their overthrow
was needed to save the English Foreign Office from difficulties and
complications. Deeper and deeper grew the resolve of the cham-
pions of right to listen to none of the lying promises of their tyrant,

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

416

to listen to none of the feeble suggestions of diplomatists, but to
£ght on in the face of Heaven and Earth, in the cause of Heaven
nnd Earth. They have fought on ; even before their independent
brethren came to their help, they had beaten back every assault of
the barbarian invader. For months and months the boasted
resources of the Turkish Government were unable to suppress the
insurrection, unable to overcome the resistance of that little band 6f
warriors, warriors worthy to rank with the men who gathered round
Alfred at Athclney, or roimd Hereward at Ely. Down to this
moment the insurrection has not been suppressed ; Herzegovina has
not been won back by the barbarian. The native heroes of the
land, strengthened by their brethren from the Black Mountain, still
stand victorious on the soil which they have won from the barbarian,
and which the barbarian has failed to win back from them. The
suppression of the insurrection which Lord Derby wished for is
still, in September, 187G, as it was in August, 1876, a thing which
diplomatists may long for, but which freedom has but little, reason
to fear.

But meanwhile another insurrection has been suppressed ; and
now the world knows what Turkish suppression of insurrections
means. The tale of Bulgarian wrongs need not be told again. Lord
Beaconsficld himself perhaps knows by this time how “ an oriental
people ” have done what all the world, except Lord Beaconsfield,
knows to be the manner of “ an oriental people.^^ They have done
as the barbarians of the East have ever done, since the Hebrew put
his Ammonite cajjtives under saws and under axes of iron, and made
them to pass through the brick-kiln. The Turk has done after his
kind ; and the voice of England, the voice of mankind, has pro-
nounced sentence on him and his abettors. Servia, which for a
moment seemed to have been overthrown in her glorious struggle,
still holds her own, and every moment that she holds her own makes
it more certain that she will not long bo left without a helper. The
mightiest people of her race will soon be on tho march for her
deliverance. Lord Derby, who, thirteen months back, was thinking
of suppressing insurrections, will soon have to think what he will do
when the myriads of Ilussia come to the help of their brethren in
blood and faith. They have come already ; despotism itself has its
bounds, and tho peace-loving Czar either cannot or will not keep back
his people from what in their eyes is the holiest of crusades. It has
come to this, that l^lnglishmen are prepared to sec Bussia step in and
do tho work that England should have done. If tho Russians ever
occupy Constantinople, it will be Lord Derby who has placed them
there.

Jt is hardly worth while to go again through the whole tale of
ministerial incapacity, to use the mildest words. Lord Beaconsfield
is true to his creed of Asian mysteries. He seeks his models among

416 PBESEISTT ASPECTS OF THE EASTEEN QUESTION.

the ancient worthies of his own people. Truly he looks to Abraham
his father and unto Sarah that bare him. Like his great ancestress,
he takes such pains to assure us that he did not laugh as to provoke
the retort, Nay, but thou didst laugh.” He recalls too at least
one exploit of his great ancestor in the zeal with which ho flies to
the help of the rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is hardly needful
again to refute the base slanders of the tongue which spoke of the
doings of the tyrant and of the patriot as equal in guilt, and which
affected to see nothing but hankering after “ provinces ” in the high
resolve of the Servian people to do or die for right. Over and over
again has Lord Derby told us that he did not, and could not, have
directly instigated the Turkish doings in Bulgaria. Over and over
again has it been explained to him that nobody ever thought that he
had directly instigated them, that he is the last man wliom anybody
would suspect of directly instigating anything. But over and over
again has it also been explained to him that ho has none the less
made himself an abettor and an accomplice after the fact, by keeping
the English fleet in a position which all mankind but himself
believed to be meant as a demonstration in favour of the evil cause.
There is no need again to answer such fallacies as the memorable argu-
ment that, because Christians, JSrahomotans, and Hindoos could live
peaceably together under the Englisli government of India, therefore
Christians and ]\Iahomctans can j)eacefully live together under the
Turkish government of Soulli-Easterii Europe. Lord Derby’s earlier
talk has become a tiling of the past. In the process of his education
he may already have got beyond it; he may be educating himself
backward to the days when his words on Turkish matters were some-
what different from his recent acts. But Lord Derby himself is
unhappily a thing of the present, and some of his later sayings are
still matters of practical importance. At the moment when I write,
Servian and Turk arc resting on their arms. An effort is being
made to bring about peace between them, a peace in the negotiation
of which a representative of Pm gland cannot fail to take a lending
part. It is a matter for anxious and painful thought that the repre-
sentative of England at such a moment should be a man who, with
whatever motives, through whatever causes, whether through
sheer indifference or sheer incapacity, has, as a matter of fact, made
himself guilty of the blood of Crete and Bulgaria.

First of all, there was something very ominous, though perhaps
from one side a little reasoning, in one of the latest sayings of Lord
Derby. He told his hearers that one of the great principles on
which he acted was “ strict neutrality while the war lasts.” Taken
in itself, this last saying of Lord Derby’s is of a piece with his first
saying about the suppression of the insurrection. According to Lord
Derby, England, which, in common with the other great powers, is
bound to he the protector of the Christian subjects of the Turk,

PBESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTEBN QUESTION. 417

England^ which is morally bound above all the other great powers
to . undo the wrongs which she has herself done to them, is to be
strictly neutral while the war lasts — ^that is, under no circumstances
is she to go beyond remonstrance, be the doings of the barbarians
towards their victims what they may. On no account, in no state of
things, is the arm of England to be stretched out to give real help
to the oppressed. Come .what may, let vietorious savages change
the whole of South-Eastern Europe into a howling wilderness,
England must not lift a weapon to hinder them. Come what may,
we must never do again the good work which we ourselves did at
Algiers, which France did in Peloponnesos, which England, France,
and Russia joined to do on the great day of Navarino. While Lord
Derby has his way, England is never again to strike another blow
for right. Sucli is the frame of mind in which the representative of
England approaches the negotiations for peace. Still there is another
side, even to his blank and chilling words. Who docs not remember
liow Lord Derby, not so very long ago, comforted himself and others
by saying the war was not likely to spread? Perhaps the world
has by this time learned that Lord Derby’s auguries as to probability
and improbability in such matters are not quite worth so much as
they wore once thought to be. In defiance of his infallible powers
of divination, the war has spread, the war is spreading, and he that
has eyes to sec must see that, if it be not stopped by a real and not a
sham i^eaco, it will soon spread further still. The last reserve of
Servia, as the Timen called it not long back, will soon be drawn out.
Russia will have come to her deliverance. We wish for no such
thing — at least it is only Lord Derby wdio has driven us to wish for
it. We liad rather see the ISouth-Eastcrn lands free themselves, or
be freed by English help, than sec them either the subjects, the
dependents, or even the grateful clients, of a power which has
hitherto promised them so much and done for them so little. But
unless Western diplomacy, Western arms. Western something, is
quicker than it has been hitherto, that will be the upshot of all. And
here we can draw some comfort even from Lord Derby’s talk about
neutrality. Strict neutrality while the war lasts must, in the
common use of language, imply strict neutrality when the war,
which was once confined to Herzegovina, which has spread from
Herzegovina to Servia, shall have spread from Servia to Russia.
Lord Derby has at least promised us that there shall not be another
Russian war. If he has bound himself to do nothing for the
oppressed, he has equally bound himself to do nothing against their
avengers.

From Lord Derby indeed this is something. Still this elaborate
ostentation of neutrality is not exactly the frame of mind in which
we should wish to see our representative going forth to the negotia-
tions by which it is hoped that the peace of South-Western Europe

418

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTEBN QUESTION.

may be secured. But Lord Derby, we are told, is capable of educa-
tion; be bas bimself talked of listening to tbe will of bis “em-
ployers.” Now bis employers have told him one thing very plainly.
They have told him that they will not put up with any sham peace,
that they will not put up with any patched-up peace, designed
simply to stave off any serious settlement, and to let the diplomatists
slumber for a few years longer. His employers, his teachers, have
broken with the rotten traditions of the last two or three genera-
tions ; and, if he wishes to bo looked on as their servant or their
pupil, he must break with them too. The people of England secs,
whether Lord Derby sees it or not, that negotiations on the basis of
the sfafus quo^ negotiations on the basis of merely communal
freedom for the revolted lands, negotiations on any terms which
imply the direct rule of the Turk, arc not only wicked, but foolish.
Negotiation on any of these terms is a crime, because it is an attempt
to prolong a state of things which is contrary to the first principles
of right. But it is more than a crime ; it is a blunder ; because it
is an attempt to prolong a state of things which cannot be prolonged.
To prolong the status quo^ to grant a merely communal freedom,
means to prolong the domination of the Turk. The domination of
the Turk means that the nations of south-eastern Europe arc to
remain bondmen in their own land, denied, not merely the political
rights of freemen, but the common rights of human beings. It
means that the vast mass of the people of the land shall remain in a
condition of permanent subjection to a handful of barbarian invaders ;
it means that at any moment the caprice of these invaders may turn
that permanent subjection into a reign of terror, a reign of ever}’'
excess of insult and outrage and fortune that the perverse wit of an
oriental people ” can devise. This state of things Lord Beacons
field and LoM Derby, if left to themselves, will prolong. If they
are left to settle matters in their own way, the owls of Bulgaria and
Herzegovina will never complain of a lack of ruined villages. Mark
that the best thing that Lord Derby has ever said, his nearest
approach that he has made to an acknowledgement of the existence
of such things as justice and freedom, is when he said that he had
no objection ” to exchange this state of things for a better. He
has no objection to the change ; but he clearly will not do anything
actively to bring it about. But Lord Dcrby*s employers and
educators are of a different mind ; they not only have no objection
to a change, but they have the strongest objection to the continuance
of the status quo. Sir Stafford Northcote lately took on himself to
say that the people do not understand questions of foreign policy.
They have shown that they understand them a great deal better
than Sir Stafford Northcote or Lord Derby. They see that, if the
siatm quo be maintained, if anything short of practical independence
be given to tho revolted lands, the whole tragedy will soon bo

PBESENT ASPECTS OP THE' EASTEItH QTTESHOH.

419

played over again. There will be more insurrections, more wars,
more massacres, and, more awful still, more diplomatic '^diffi-
oulties” and complications.’’ The people of England demand
that, now that the Eastern question is ^'opened,” it shall be
settled ; they know that settlements of this kind are no settle-
ments at all, but simply wretched shifts to stave off a settle-
ment. The people of England have, with one voice, declared that,
however much Mr. Baring may satisfy Sir Henry Elliot, however
much Sir Henry Elliot may satisfy Lord Beaconsfield, none of them
will satisfy the common employers of all, if they attempt to make
n settlement on any terms short of the practical independence of the
revolted lands. Those lands must be separated from the direct rule
of the Turk. Last December I pleaded for the separation of Bosnia
and Herzegovina ; to this demand the universal voice of England
has added the separation of Bulgaria, while not a few voices have
added the separation of Crete. If Lord Derby enters on any
legislation with the faintest purpose of accepting any terms short of
these, ho will show that his education has not yet been carried at
all near to the point at which his progress will satisfy his employers.

At this time of day it is perhaps hardly needful to answer objections
about forsaking the traditional policy of England, or to reason
against stupid fear of the Russian bugbear. To the former objection
the simple answer is that the policy of England has for a long time
been a wrong policy, and that England has made up her mind to
oxchange it for a right policy. England will no more acknowledge,
if it ever did acknowledge, the base doctrine of Lord Derby that
we are never to interfere in any matter but where our interest
demands it. The people, generous in its sentiments, even when it
is mistaken as to facts, will never stoop to such teaching at this.
The people approved the Russian war, because they^Were taught to
believe that the Russian war was undertaken in a generous cause.
We must repeat again for the thousandth time that the duty of
England comes before her interest. We must, at any risk, undo
the wrong that we have done. If to undo that wrong should bring
the Russians to Constantinople, if it should weaken our empire in
India, let the Russians come to Constantinople, let our empire in India
be weakened. Lord Beaconsfield said that the fleet was sent to Besika
Bay in pursuit of honour and glory. The kind of honour and glory
of which he spoke may perhaps demand that the nations of south-
eastern Europe be again pressed down under the yoke. But the
people of England have had enough of that kind of honour and
glory. They have learned that true honour and glory can be won
only by doing right at all hazards.

As for the Russian hobgoblin, no friend of South-Eastern Europe
wishes to see Constantinople Russian. All that we say is that, if we
are driven to choose between Turk and Russian, we will take the

420

PRESENT ASPECTS OP THE EASTERN QUESTION.

Busdan. But we say tliis^ not in the interest of England, but in the
interest of South-Eastern Europe. We wish to see the now enslaved
nations grow up for themselves, developing their own energies,
striking out paths of freedom and progress for themselves. There-
fore we do not wish to see them subjects of Bussia. But, if this
cannot be, if the only choice lies between a civilized and a barbarous
despotism, between a despotism which at least secures to its subjects
the common rights of human beings and a despotism which makes
no attempt to secure them, we havo no doubt as to which despotism
we ought to choose. And we feel that, if things come to such a
choice, the fault will not be ours, but the fault of those who have
allowed Bussia to take the championship of right out of the hands of
England. Even if it could be shown that the interest of England
lay on the side of the worse choice, we should still again say. Let the
interest of England give way to her duty. But the notion that Eng-
land has any interest in the matter is simply a worn-out superstition.
I saw the other day an argument that it was not for the interest of
England to allow any strong power to hold the Bosi)oro8. ITere is
the wicked old doctrine that the strength of one nation must be the
weakness of another. The stronger the power that holds the Bosporos
4he better, provided it bo u native power. But if the folly and weak-
ness of our diplomatists have decreed that it should be held, not by a
native but by a llussian power, wo shall lament the result, but we
shall fail to see how the interest of England is involved. The only
ground on which it has ever been pretended that our interest is
touched in the matter, has been because it is said that the presence
of Russia on the Bosporos would block our path to India. But our
path to India does not lie by the Bosporos, but by Suez ; and if Egypt
could be transferred from its present merciless tyrant to the rule of
England or of any other civilized power, it would be the greatest of
boons for all the inhabitants, ilahometan and Christian, of that
unhappy land.

When I am asked what is to be done, I say again what I said in
December, with such changes as have been made needful by the
events of the last nine months. Bosnia, Turkish Croatia, Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, and Crete must be delivered from the immediate rule of
the Sultan. This is the least that outraged Europe can accept. This is
the commission which Lord Derby has received in the plainest terms
from his employers and educators. And the word Bulgaria must
not be limited to the land north of Hsemus, which alone bears that
name in our maps. The Bulgarian folk and speech, the remains of the
kingdom of Samuel, roach far to the south of the mountains, and a large
part of the worst deeds of th^ Turk havo been done south of the moun-
tains. This is the minimum^ the least which can be demanded in the
name of outraged humanity. All those lands must be put in a position
not worse than the position of Boumania now, not worse than the

PBESENT ASPECTS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

421

position of Servia before tbo war. It is in no way hampering or em-
barrassing the Government, to quote a favourite party cry of the
moment, to give them, in answer to Lord Derby’s own request, these
plain instructions. The exact boundaries of the new spates to be
formed, the exact form of government to be set up in each, the princes,
if they are to have princes, who arc to be chosen for each, these are
points of detail which we leave to the assembled wisdom of Europe.
Wo may criticize an}^ definite proposal when it is made ; it is not
our business to make definiic j)roposals beforehand. Let Turkish
rule cease, and, though one change may be better than another, any
change will be better than Turkish rule. As for Servia, no one
will stop to discuss the insolent paper which was put forth by
the baffled barbarian who tries to win by fraud what he has found
that he cannot win by arms. The Turk has wrought his evil
deeds in Servia, but he has not conquered Servia ; the impudent
demands which go on the assiimi^tion that he has conquered Servia
must bo thrust down his own barbarian throat. Let Servia bo
not worse of!' than she was before the war ; let the revolted lands
be not worse off than Servia ; this is the programme of the people of
England. Details they hiave to those whose business it is to settle
them ; but their minds are made up as to the root of the matter.
Less than I have just said they will not have.

Events do indeed pass quickly. Lctween the writing of the last
paragriiph and its revision, the insolence of the barbarian himself
has been outshone. The lowest bellower in the Oxford mob could
not depart farther from truth, farther from reason, farther from
decency, than Lord Leaconsfield did in his notorious speech at Ayles-
bury. When the new Earl told the world that to speak the truth
about Turkish ‘‘atrocities” was a greater “atrocity” than to do
them, it was hard not to remember that there is but one living
statesman of whom it has been said that ho says the first thing
that comes into his head, and takes his chance of its being
true. When w’c go on and read the monstrous misstatements
which Lord Bcaconsficld was not ashamed to make with regard to
the affairs of Servia, it is hard not to reflect on that curious rule of
conventional good breeding by which to call such misstatements by
their plain English name is deemed a greater offence than to make
them. But the Psalmist’s phrase of “them that speak leasing,”
Gulliver’s jDhrase about saying “ the thing that is not,” may perhaps
be allowed even in those serene regions where the new' Earl tells us
that he walks. And truly Lord Beaconsfield’s babble about Servia —
not “ coffee-house babble,” but babble doubtless over some stronger
liquor — was, if any human utterance ever was, “the thing that is not.”
Lord Beaconsfield, by his ow'ii account, should have talked about
barley ; he perhaps meant, instead of talking about barley, to sow
the wild oats of his new state of being. The one thing of importance

422

PBESENT ASPECTS OP THE EASTERN QT7ESTION.

in tliis strange harangue is Lord Beaconsfield^s distinct assertion
that the revolted lands' shall not be free. The people of Tlngland
have distinctly said that they shall bo free. Whose voice is to be-
followed? To which of the two will Lord Derby listen as his
educator? To which of the two will he yield obedience as his
employer ?

After Lord Beaconsfield’s display at Aylesbury all earlier displays,
as we come back to them, seem tame. There is, for instance, the-
paltry cavil, the last straw at which the despairing advocates of evil
clutch, the slander that the revolted lands are unworthy, incapable of
freedom. Will they become more worthy, more capable, by remain-
ing in bondage ? In diplomatic circles it would seem that men learn
the art of swimming without ever going into the water, that they learn
the art of riding without ever mounting a horse. The lesson of free-
dom can be learned only in the practice of freedom. There may be-
risks, there may be difficulties; some men have been drowned in
learning the art of swimming; still, that art cannot be learned
on dry land. We appeal to reason; wc appeal to experience;
diplomatic cavillers shut their eyes to both. Go to Servia; go to
Montenegro; see what free Servia, what freer Montenegro, has.
done, and be sure that free Bulgaria will do as much.

Last of all, the programme which I have just sketched, the
programme which the people of England have accepted, the pro-
gramme which Lord Bcaconsfield scoffs at, is only a minimum. It
is the least that can be taken; if more can be had, so much
the better. Such a programme is in its own nature temporary ;
any programme must be temporary which endures the rule of the
Turk in any corner of Europe. But such a programme is not tempo-
rary in the sense in which the makeshifts of diplomatists, the mainte-
nance of the status quo and the like, are temporary. Bestore the statm
quo^ grant anything short of practical independence, and all that has
been done, all that has been suffered, during the last year.)vill have
to be done and suffered over again. If wc free the revolted lands,
even if wc leave the lands which arc not revolted still in bondage, we
leave nothing to be done over again ; we only leave something in
front of us still to be done. We make a vast step in advance; we
enlarge the area of freedom, even if we do not w'holly wipe out the
area of bondage. To maintain, or rather to restore, the status quo is to
make the greatest of all steps backwards ; it is to enlarge the area of
bondage at the expense of the area of freedom. The programme of the
status quOy the programme of Lord Beaconsfield, points nowhere ; the
programme of the people of England points distinctly in front. We
•will have New Borne some day ; if Mr. Grant Duff can give it us at
onoe, jso much the better. The conversion of Mr. Grant Duff — for a
conversion it may surely be called^ — is one of the most remarkable
phases of the whole business. Mr. Grant Duff has never been hdd to

PBESENT ASPECTS OP THE EASTERN QUESTION.

423

be raBh or sentimental ; be has never been thought likely to say or do
anything windy or gusty or frothy, to quote some of the epithets to
which those who set facts, past and present, before the traditions of
diplomatists have got pretty well seasoned. Only a few weeks ago,
some of us were tempted to look on Mr. Grant Duff as almost as cold-
blooded as Lord Derby himself. All is now changed. Mr. Grant Duff
undertakes to lead us to the walls of Constantinople ; and, where he
undertakes to lead, no one can be called fool-hardy for following. There
is no need oven to dispute about such a detail as the particular ruler
whom Mr. Grant Duff has chosen to place on the throne of the Leos and
the Basils. Mr. Grant Duff has perhaps had better opportunities than
most of us for judging of the Duke of Edinburgh’s qualifications for
government. At any rate we may be certain of one thing ; his rule
would be better than the rule of any Sultan. The examples of Servia
and Montenegro, the example of Sweden — even the example of France
— ^inight, one would have thought, done something to get rid of the
queer superstition that none can reign whoso fathers have not reigned
before them. A man who had had some practice in ruling, an experi-
enced colonial governor for instance, might perhaps seem better fitted
for the post than one who is a prince, and, as far as we know, only a
prince. But here again it would be foolish to dispute about details.
Any civilized ruler would be better than any barbarian. And Mr.
Grant Duff’s proposal for the employment of Indian officials is at all
events wise and practical. Our platform then is simple. The more
impetuous fervour of Mr. Gladstone leads us to a certain point, which
is the least with which we can put up. The colder reason of Mr.
Grant Duff leads us to a further point, to which we shall be delighted
to follow him thither if we can, and, if he assures as that we can, no
one can have any reason to doubt his assurance. Lord Derby then
has his lesson ; he has his commission. His teachers, his employers,
have spoken their mind. The least we ask is the freedom of the
revolted lands ; but we take this only as a step to the day when the
FTew Home shall be cleansed from barbarian rule. There may be risks,
there may be difficulties ; but the Turk would hardly be so mad as
to stand up against six great powers. Three such powers have in past
times been enough to bring him to reason. If the trembling despot
dares to dispute the will of his masters, he must again be taught a yet
more vigorous form of the same lesson which was taught him when
France cleansed Peloponnesus of the destroying Egyptian, when
England, France, and Bussia joined to crush the power of the Turk
in the harbour of Pylos. The blinded ministers of that day could
see in the good work nothing but an untoward event.” l^gland
now is wiser. Her people will have quite another name in their
mouths, if the obstinacy of the barbarian should again draw upon
him such another stroke of righteous vengeance.

Edward A. Freebiak.

ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.^

Who are the men who made <lie Japanese revolution, and who now
maintain and defend its principles ?

What are the chances of the popularity of the Japanese revolution
continuing ?

What, then, will he the duration of the present settled order of
things ; and, will English ideas continue for an indefinite period to
gain ground in the country of the Eising Sun ?

These are questions much oftener asked than answered, although
the actual history of Lhe Jaj)ancse Revolution is to be found recorded
in a great number of books. • •

The first question — ^likc many questions about Japan— can be
more easily answered negatively than positively. The revolution
was not made by any one man, nor by any very small group of men.
The Emperor, formerly known as the Mikado, in whose name it was
made, and by the influence of the authority of whose name its
principles arc still protected, had no share whatever in its concep-
tion or execution. That which was nominally a revolution of the
Daimios, was in fact a revolution of their councillors. Each
Daimio was assisted — or, rather, controlled, in the government of his
feudal province by a small council chosen from among his retainers.
The members of these councils were, as a rule, selected for ability
by the council itself. They drew but little pay, and in their manner
of life were not to be distinguished from the other retainers of the
feudal prince. It is but little known that Daimios and their coun-
cillors alike hated the Tycoons. I will assume that my readers
understand the position which had been held for five hundred jears
by these mayors of the palace, who supported the Mikado, in whose
name they ruled, by a dole of twenty thousand pounds a year for
the maintenance of the court at the ancient capital. The revolution
had, of course, to be made in the Mikado’s name ; but it was not to
be expected that a god-king, who had never been outside his palace,
and who had never, according to many, set foot to earth even within
his palace walls, would have the energy or develop the power to
take a leading part in the revolutionary movement. During the
revolution the Mikado, gifted ^as he is with a gentle and fair
disposition, acted as he has acted since, namely by approving without
hesitation, although with actual knowledge, of everything done in
his name. His present position as Emperor was expressed to me by
a Japanese^gentleman in these words — “ He never says ‘ No,’ only

(1) An additional chapter for ** Great Britain."

ENGLISH INFLT7ENCE IN JAPAN.

m

< Yes ’ — a sentence which would doubtless gratify the heart of
Earl Bussell. Made in this man’s name^ the revolution was carried
through by the councillors of the Daimios, with the approval of
their patrons. The Tycoon’s government had never been popular
with the Daimios. All Japanese history is a record of th^ partial
rebellions. Since Commodore PeiTy’s landing on the coast of Japan,
the Tycoons had happened to be haughty men, who had given more
than usual offence to the feudal princes, while the presence of the
foreigner had caused the war exactions to press more heavily upon
them, and at the same time had excited the agricultural population.
All these facts told one way, and behind the Daimios were the ablest
of their councillors, who saw in revolution not only a great career
for themselves, but also a chance of a brilliant future for that
country which almost every Japanese loves more than he loves life.
The Satsuma and Ghoshiu clans were the strongest that took part in
the revolution ; but that it was the councillors, and not the princes,
who really led, is clear when we remember that the reigning prince
of Satsuma was a child, and the reigning prince of Choshiu a fool.

The revolution is sometimes said to have been directed against
foreign influence. Foreign influence was a pretext. Some of
the murders of foreigners by armed retainers of the feudal nobles
were caused by a breach of Japanese etiquette by the victims, but
most of the attacks arc now known to have been made out of a
fixed purpose of embroiling the Tycoon with his foreign friends.
The revolutionary leaders knew, as well as the Tycoon knew, that
the foreign influence was certain to endure ; and on the other hand,
in spite of the Queen’s presents to the Tycoon, Sir Harry Farkes
was more friendly to the revolution than he was to the government
at the capital. Okubo, the present prime minister, and his leading
colleagues were councillors of Daimios. Contrary to the prevailing
English belief, there has been no change of government in Japan
since the revolution, although there has been a certain shifting of
persons. The men who made the armed revolution still direct that
strange, peaceful, revolutionary government, which quietly rules
Japan on revolutionary principles through despotic forms, and in the
name of a heaven-descended Mikado encircled by a halo of aU but
actual divinity.

'^But Iwakura,” say some, who have heard or read a little of
Japanese politics, ^‘Iwakura, the foreign minister, who fora time
was here, and Shimadzu Saburo, the great conservative chief— have
not they held power, or rather fallen from it P ” Ho. Iwakura was
a courtier. A courtier ” in Japan meant one of the poetic, highly
cultured, but un-energetic men, who surrounded the Mikado in his
seclusion in the ancient capital. He was the ablest of the courtiers,
and was valuable to the revolution through his station; but the

VOL. XX. N.S. G G

426

ENGLISH INFLUJ^CE IN JAPAN. *

oourtierSy so &r as they have been used, have been the instruments
of those able, pushing democrats, the former councillors of the feudal
barons. What energy can be hoped for in men, however talented
and however learned, who were the courtiers of a god-king, immured
in that cathedral city of the East, the ancient capital, formerly
Miako, and now Eiyoto — ^for even capitals change their names every
few years in the revolutionary land of Japan? As for Shimadzu
Saburo, on the other hand, he is the uncle of the young prince of
Satsuma, who is at the head of the most powerful of the clans.
That is to say, he is the foremost man among the Scotchmen of
Japan. It happens that he is a Scotch Tory, while most of his clan
are Badicals — ^still, he is the first man of that people who fill every
office, military or civil, for which they have a candidate ready.
There are not very many of them, but their numbers seem to be the
only limit to the places which they hold. Shimadzu’s brother, the
late prince of Satsuma, who died, I think, just before the revolution,
was a man so able that, had he lived, he would perhaps have changed
the whole future of his country. Living as he did in pre-revolution-
ary days, he had to confine himself to manufacturing Bohemian
glass, building steamboats without foreign aid, and setting up a
telegraph line in his own county. But even as singular an event
as the rule of an ex-Daimio may come to pass in Japan. Since his
fall the ex-Tycoon — a very able man — has spent his time in shooting
and sketching after the manner of his ancestors; but it is now
beginning to be rumoured that it is far from improbable that the
ex-Tycoon, who ten years ago was called by us the Emperor of
Japan, may one of these days accept office in the revolutionary
government carried on in the name of the Mikado. Shimadzu
Saburo is so violent a Tory that ho is exposed to much ridicule in
Japan. In 1874 his time was taken up with writing a book called
^^Bemmo,” an elaborate attack on Christianity, which has been
translated into English, but of which I saw the Japanese ^^tion,
with cuts of all the Christian miracles. In 1875 he again turned
his attention to politics. The edict against officials having their
heads shaved had no fiercer opponent. He was a member of the
coimdl of state, and the day after the first intimation of the desire
of the Government that officials should wear European dress appeared,
he came down to the council with the hair of the sides of the scalp
more firmly gummed up over the shaven part than ever, with one
coolie to carry a mat for him to sit on among his colleagues (who
of course were aU seated in high velvet chairs,) another coolie to
joarry his pipe, and a third coolie to pull out over his feet the
brocaded trousers, which train behind a Japanese gentleman of the
bid school. He became in the course of the year exceedingly dis-
satisfied *with the Government. While I was in Japan, in the

ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

427

autumn, lie made a great speecli at the council in favour of war
with the Corea, which he advocated chiefly for the purpose, he said,
of giving employment to the late Samurai, or two-sworded followers
of the Daimios. Of this dangerous class he is the accepted repre-
sentative. When the Government decided to try and settle the
Corean difficulty by peaceful means, Shimadzu resigned his member-
ship of the council. Eight general officers in the army, all belonging
to the Satsuma clan, resigned on the same night, and the Govern-
ment expected a rising in the southern provinces. None took place,
but it would not have been unwelcome to the men in power at the
capital. They believe that the army can be trusted, and that any
Conservative rising can be put down, while the opportunity would
be taken to carry out some rather dangerous reforms. At the same
time, as most of the superior officers in the army, from the com-
mander-in-chief downwards, are Satsuma men, the confidence of the
Government in the forces of the Mikado shows that Japanese patriot-
ism must be stronger than any local feeling in the minds of the most
distinguished of Shimadzu’s fellow clansmen.

Such is the Radicalism of the Mikado’s government, that any
Englishman, whatever may be his politics, cannot fail to feel much
sympathy with the Japanese Conservatives. The students trained
in England and America must be personally offensive to them in the
highest degree, and many of the acts of the Government which are,
I am bound to say, regarded with indifference by the people, display
a want of reverence for the past which can only be described as
shameless. The selling for old metal of some of the most important
monumental bronzes in the world, was nominally, in many cases, the
act of the priests. In some cases it was undoubtedly the act of the
Government itself, and the Government could at once have put a stop
to tho practice, had it chosen to do so. I have it, upon very high
authority, that the Government proposed to sell Dai-Butz, 'a
bronze and silver Buddha, sixty feet high, which is unequalled in
Eastern religious art, and that this act of Vandalism was prevented
only by the interference of some of the foreign ministers. 1 may
add, that the ‘^guardian figures” at the gates of tho Temple at
Kamakura, where the great Buddha stands, were destroyed by fire,
and such has been the decline of religious sentiment among the
people, that they could only be restored by a subscription among the
European residents at Yokohama! The Japanese government are
suspected of a strong wish to destroy the tombs of the Tycoons at
Tokio (formerly Yeddo), where there is another magnificent relic of
the past, the Loo Ghoo gates, bronze doors set up out of moneys paid
as l^bute by Loo Choo to Japan in the* Middle Ages. All these
monuments of which I have spoken are Buddhist, and Buddhism is
the religion of two-thirds of the inhabitants of Japan ; but it is not

G G 2

428

ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

tlie sstablished creedi whicli is the mysterious pure Shintoo. The
greatest temple in the capital was burnt down some years ago,, and
the incendiaries were hanged in 187 5, while I was in J apan. They
were Buddhist priests, and had destroyed their temple because it
bad been ‘‘purified ” by order of the Government — /.c., converted
into a Shintoo temple. The Government state that they have not
confiscated Buddhist temples, but have only “ purified those which
had been Shintoo, and which, under the influence of the Tycoons,
had become Buddhist — for the Tycoons belonged to the faith of the
majority, and not to the faith of the Mikado.

To show how radical is the Government of Japan, and how utterly
disregardful of vested rights where public interests arc at stake, I
will refer to a matter in which a change is about to be made, which
would hardly be approved, except under the pressure of desperate
necessity, by western Eadicals. The retainers, now strong and poor,
while their ex-masters are weak and rich, are going to plunder them
for the benefit of the fatherland. At the time when the revolution
was made, the great sagacity of the leading men led them to patch
up everything for a time. To the cx-Tycoon was given a province,
which has since been taken from him. To the Daimios was given
one- tenth of their former incomes, free of every kind of charge, so that
Satsiima, for instance, who had had an army and a fleet to keep up,
and a province to rule, out of eight hundred thousand pounds a year,
has received eighty thousand pounds a year to play with, ever since
the revolution. The retainers got nothing, except some posts, and
those who were not sufficiently clever or instructed to become
officers, civil or military, have had to earn their living by dragging
miniature hansoms about the streets, and in some cases have begged
their bread. Taxation now begins to press ; the Government is poor
in proportion to its wants, and the result is that, although they were
only fixed six or seven years ago, the pensions of the Daimios are to
be reduced. It is perfectly safe to take this step, and the Eunopean-
trained Japanese regard with astonishment a stranger who asks any
other question in relation to the proposed change. If you hint that
it is not, perhaps, quite just, the answer at once is, “ These persons
do nothing whatever for the money they receive.” At the same
time, such is the astonishing strength of patriotism in Japan, that
it is very possible that when the ex-Daimios are told that they must
pay for the perfecting of the revolution, they will cheerfully and
willingly submit.

An inspection of the Japanese “new Doomsday-Book” shows that
some, at all events, of the Daimios aro not “ doing nothing ”' in all
senses, for some of the* names may be recognised as those of men
who are working hard to enable themselves to take a place among
those of 'their countrymen who are masters of the foreign learning.

ENGLISH 1NFLX7ENGE IN JAPAN.

429

The gentleman who, but for the revolution, would have been Prince
of Awa, is an undergraduate at Oxford. His income is returned at
£25,000 a year. The ex-Prince of Hizan, whoso income is returned
at £35,000 a year, is living in London with his family. His
territorial title, and that of Satsuma, are not the only ones on the
list which are dear to lovers of oriental ware.^ ^'Kanga,” with his
£90,000 a year, is suggestive of red and gold. There are about
thirty ex-Daimios, who have, at present, incomes of over £20,000
a year a-picce, but all are now pensioners of the State. Their names
appear in a pension list, and the total amount voted under the head
of pensions is £2,800,000 a year. This is a large item in the accounts
of Japan. The revenue and the expenditure of the country each
stands at £9,000,000 and odd. The pensions are half as much again
as the military expenditure, five times the cost of the navy, and five
times the interest on the debt. The country is democratically
organized, although under despotic forms. Money is wanted on all
sides for the splendidly efficient services which have been set on
foot. In army, navy, education, post-office, lighthouses, railroads,
statistics, Japan wants to be on a level with the European world.
Money must be found. On the other hand, trade is rather de-
creasing than increasing; tea and silk are the chief exports, and
Japanese tea is peculiar, and does not easily find new markets, while
the growth of the silk trade in Italy is doing serious damage to
Japan. Under these circumstances, it is not strange that there
should be an outcry for the reduction of the pensions. There would
be such an outerj’^ in all countries, but in Euroj^e it would be without
result. In Japan the reduction of the Daimios" pensions will
probably take place. Okuma, the finance minister, is a clever man,
but what can he do ? Public opinion bids him fall upon the nobles.
Their pensions, it must be observed, are already liable to taxation,
and they have been reached by the heavy income tax, which took
about a tenth of their incomes last year.

There is but one new commercial prospect that seems opening for
Japan. The Government is at present engaged on a praiseworthy
attempt to introduce sheep, w^ith the view of converting the hills
into pasture land. If this can ever be done, the population and the
wealth of Japan may be enormously increased. The hills cover
two-thirds of the country ; the forests that once stood on them have
all been cut, not a stick of timber has been planted, and no use
whatever is made of the mountain tracts.

There are two points arising out of the matters I have just
mentioned, in which Japan stands before the average of European
powers; and one in which she stands at least before some — ^her
finance accounts may be taken without suspicion. The services in
which Japan stands so well ore lighthouses and post-offices. I have

430

EyOLIStt INFITJENCB IN JAPAN.

Eefbre me as I write the annual report of the Postmaster-General
for 1876. The foreign post-office service was first introduced into
Japan for trial on one ro^ only in 1871. In four years Japan has
beaten Denmark^ Norway, Sweden, Turkey, and Greece. Three
thousand five hundred post offices have been already opened, and the
increase of letters posted is at the rate of fifty per cent, a year.
As the Postmaster-General says in his report, ^‘The enormous increase
of fifty-six per cent, on the revenue of the preceding year is due
... to the rapid progress of civilisation.” He may well call the
progress extraordinary, and the chief factor in producing the result
has been the personal cleverness of the Japanese people. Let any
one sit down with books alone to make a steam engine, and he will
have some idea of the quickness to learn foreign arts which the
Japanese display. The present minister for foreign afiairs, as well
as the late Prince of Satsuma, constructed engines in this manner.
Every element of foreign civilisation has been introduced into Japan
with the latest improvements which it has received. The Japanese,
very properly, will have everything of the best, and their lighthouse
system may be taken as an example. They already have thirty-
three lighthouses at work, which are models to any country in the
world.

All these services cost money, and there still may come a con-
servative reaction to the cry of keeping down the rates.” To hang
the whole of the students who have been educated abroad, to restore
their swords to the Samurai, and to strip the guards of their tunics
and kepis, and give them back their armour of ten years ago, is a
policy which may commend itself to Shimadzu Saburo, but is not
within the bounds of possibility. The land-tax has increased, but
the people are still on the whole contented, and their rulers are
sufficiently clever to watch the signs of the times, and to be guided
by public opinion. There are some Europeans living in Japan who
hold the opposite view. Groaning under the somewhat ignorant
Radicalism of the newly appointed local officials, they will tell you
that the country has become a "prig^s paradise,” and that the reform
movement will be at least checked, if not wholly suspended, by a
return to power of the old feudal chiefs. They point out that in the
powerful southern province, or as it might rather be called, tho
feudal and tributary kingdom of Satsuma, the Mikado’s officers
possess but little power, and they believe that the attitude of the
Prince of Satsuma towards the Mikado may at any moment become
that of the Dukes of Burgundy towards the Kings of France. The
" Pakeha-Maories ” of this part of the world, the English Japanese,
who, having lived ten years at Yokohama, think that they can tell
**modiem Kiyoto” from “old Satsuma,” will assure you that the reform
moYemcEut fails to perform that which it has promised, and that it

ENGLISH INELrENCE IN JAPAN.

431

cannot giye efficient goyemment because of the state of the finances.
All that I can say upon the point is that eveiywhere in Japan the
traveller sees all the outward signs of good government, the only
exception — ^the state of the bridges — ^not being important in a
country where there are hardly any horses, and hardly any heavy
vehicles. When war with Corea was threatened in the autumn of
last year, the Nichi Nichi Shimbun^ one of the native newspapers of
the capital, spoke of the Government as likely to go into a foreign
war in order to stifle discontent at home, and called this the fatal
policy of Napoleon III.’’ The answer is that the Government did
not go to war, but, on the contrary, successfully resisted the strong
pressure which was put upon it by the war party : and those among
the foreign ministers who know the country best believe that there is
little reason to fear for the future of Japan.

My mention just now of the post-office reminds me of one of the
grievances of the Japanese against this country, the existence of which
is a slight bar to our influence becoming even greater than it is at
present. Why should England refuse to follow the TTnited States
into a postal convention with Japan, and to accord her a position
which we give to a backward country like Greece ? Under so honest
and careful a government as tho Japanese, the retention of our
separate post-office at Yokohama is a blunder almost fit to rank with
the want of courtesy shown in connection with the monstrous claim
of sporting rights in Japan set up by British subjects and backed by
British power. I should go so far as to believe that extra-territoriality
itself might with safety be given up in Japan. The Japanese would
then allow foreigners to reside anywhere in the country, the splendid
mines would then be worked wuth foreign capital and under foreign
direction, to the benefit both of Japan and Great Britain. AuSl have
named the mineral wealth of the country, in which lies her future
chance of an extended trade, let me explain that there is scarcely a
part of the empire which does not contain minerals. Coal is
plentiful in the north; gold, copper, tin, lead, iron, iron sand,
plumbago, antimony, copperas, cobalt, and sulphur are abundant ; '
there is much marble, rock-salt, amber, fire-clay, porcelain-clay,
petroleum, alum, rock-crystal, and some silver. With the excep-
tion of coal, these minerals are scattered all over the southern
islands. Without going so far, however, as at present to give up
extra-territoriality, there is much that could be done in the removal
of small causes of irritation. Fuss, fidget, and bluster are not the
best means of making friends with a young power, whose help in the
North Pacific we may one day need. As an example of our less
pleasant dealings with tho Japanese, let me quote the heads of the
shooting question. Englishmen, in the pursuit of their favourite
amusement of shooting all over the country, have at times killed

432

ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

poultryi and dightly wounded inliabitants. The Japanese Govern-
ment, rightly carefid of the Uvea and property of its subjects, not
unnaturally objected, and proposed a system of shooting regulations
combined with game laws, which was acknowledged to be reasonable.
The Government offered to do the police work necessary for the
enforcement of the game laws to protect EngUsh sport, and they con-
sented that offences under them should be heard by the foreign
consular courts, but they asked that a table of fines should be agreed
on before hand, so as to secure uniform treatment for all foreigners,
and that these fines should go to the Government to recognise its right,
and to compensate the informers. In the only other similar case of
penalties inflicted on foreigners — ^namely, fines under customs regu-
lations — ^the fines are specially fixed for all foreigners, and go to the
Japanese Government. The Japanese only ask that this precedent
should be followed. All the powers, except England, offered to
concede the point, but Sir Harry Parkes expects that the Japanese
shall find shooting for England and protect it by game laws, and
that the paltry fines shall go to England, who is thus to benefit by
the acts of her oum criminals.

I named just now, as one reason for our trying to extend our already
great influence in Japan, the possibility that a time will come when
Japan might be a useful ally to us in the North Pacific. Such is
the efficiency of the Japanese forces that a mere statement of their
number should be accompanied with a reminder of their serious
value. Their navy employs 4,214 men, all drilled under English
instructors. All Japanese are liable to military service in the army,
but the actual regular force — the whole of which would have been
landed on the coast of China from seven to ten days after the
declaration of war, had not war been prevented by the action of
Sir T. F. Wade, two years ago — consists, on a war footing, of
49,930 men. On a peace footing, the anny consists of 35,320 men,
of whom 2,460 are artillery, 1,230 engineers, 440 military tvain,
720 garrison troops, and 30,080 infantry, including the imperial
guard. There is only one regiment of cavalry. The effectiveness
of the Japanese army is immensely increased by the fact that the
great steam navigation company which owns some of the finest
steamers in the world, is only the Japanese Government under
another name, and the whole of the ships running to Shanghai are
liable at a moment’s notice to be used for the conveyance of troops.
There can be little doubt that, had war broken out between China
and Japan two years ago, the Japanese would have taken Pekin ;
although, looking to the fact that the population of Japan is but
little over 33,000,000, it is possible that Pekin would have proved a
Moscow.

There is One future suggested by the military statistics I have just

ENGLISH INPLUENGE IN JAPAN.

433

given^ which would be even brighter than that of having Japan
fbr our firm friend in the Pacific. Shall I be accused of dreaming
dreams if. I ask whether it would not be a happy thing that the
Pacific should be neutralised? The states at present bordering
upon that ocean, or wholly situated within its limits, have not yet
followed those of Europe into reckless military expenditure. Japan
is entering upon that course ; and con we blame her when we
remember the perpetual presence of a Bussian squadron upon her
coasts ? Australia has no army, America desires no triumph of the
sword, and Bussia alone of all the Pacific powers is suspected of
ambitious designs. Would it not be possible to induce the European
Powers to agree to support the status quo in the Pacific, and to
recommend the island Powers of that ocean to put down their
armies, and apply their revenues to public works and purposes of
trade, of art, and of civilisation ?

I have answered, as well as I can, the questions with which I set
out, but it is impossible to satisfy even one’s self as to the accuracy of
statements which concern so strange a country as Japan. What con
be, or ever has been, in the history of the world, more singular than
the combination of the extreme democracy of the spirit of its govern-
ment with the blind tradition that is personified in the Mikado?
I said above that the Mikado had taken but little part in public
afiuirs. The marvellous fact is that, in so revolutionary a country,
he should be there at all. His ancestors have reigned for 2,536
years at least, and his style, with magnificent simplicity, runs
“ Mutsuhito, by the grace of Heaven, Emperor of Japan, seated on
a throne occupied by one dynasty from time immemorial.”

I ought to explain what I mean by the phrase, ** English infiu-
ence in Japan.” The diplomatic power of the English Government
is perhaps greater than that of any other single foreign country at
the court of Tokio, but it is not overwhelming ; and were I thinking
of it alone I should not speak of the English infiuence in Japan in
the verj^ strong terms that I have used. Japan plays off America
against the European Powers, and by the spread of Bussian dominion
in Saghalien and towards the Corea, Japan is brought into close
relations with a state the diplomacy of which has always been
superior to that of England, and which is represented at Tokio
by Mr. Struve, the once-dreaded secretary of the Government of
Turkestan, who has never shown his great talent more clearly
than in persuading the English community in Yokohama, and his
colleagues at the capital, that garden parties are his only thought.
Thus the English diplomatic influence, although the greatest, does
not stand alone. In the organization of the services of Japan, the
English do not take even the first place, for the French have the
law and the army (though a change is being made), while the

434

liNGLISH INFLUEI^GE IN JAPAK.

English have to themselyes only the nayy and the mint;^ but
l^e aeryices are passing rapidly into the ^nds of the Japanese
themselyes.

The Japanese Goyemment now employs only about a third as
many Europeans altogether as were employed four years ago. The
day is near at hand when a few French lawyers, acting as inter-
preters of the Code Civile will be the only foreign seryants in the pay
of the Japanese. But it must not be supposed from these facts that
the English influence will decrease when Englishmen haye ceased to
serye the Goyemment of Japan. The external trade of Japan is, and
seems likely to continue to be, in English hands. Yokohama and
Hiogo are English towns. The Chinese are gaining ground in the
treaty ports, but the Chinese influence in these days is the influence
of Ikgland in another shape. In spite of the use of the Chinese
character by the cultivated Japanese, the language of trade, as
between the Chinese and Japanese in the treaty ports, is the English
tongue. Many of the Chinese merchants are English subjects,
coming as they do from Hong Eong. Moreoyer, and aboye all, the
political influences of England and of America combine to lead the
Japanese to the use of English as the ofiicial language. This policy
is backed by all considerations of conyenience in the case of an island
power situated in the Pacific, the language of which is English, and
trading but little with any country except America, England, the
English Colonies and the thoroughly English treaty ports of China.
The defeat of France by Germany, in the war of 1870, has operated
in the same direction. The military, legal and financial prestige of
French administration had caused the Japanese statesmen to copy the
general goyemmental organization of France. Since the war
Americans haye stepped into many of the posts which Frenchmen
used to fill, and the training of a few Japanese military students at
Berlin has not affected the general result.

The rise of European influence in Japan has been accompanied4)y
a patriotic revulsion against that which was formerly the chief
foreign influence — namely, the Chinese. We may compare the
patriotic rage against Germany, and the destruction of German
influence which has accompanied the opening of Bussia to western
thought. Chinese influence was once as dominant in Japan as was
German influence at St. Petersburg ; but there is no reason to fear
that the foreign influence of the present day will die out in Japan as
the Chinese influence has died out. The Chinese civilisation was
adopted by the Japanese because it was altogether superior to their
o?ni, and it was abandoned when found to be inferior to that of the
weatem nations. Much has been written with regard to the rapidiiy
with which the change has occurred, and it is indeed impossible not
to forget that only fifteen years ago no European could set foot in

ENGLISH INHiUENGE* IN -7APAN.

48S

Japan except a Dutchnian, and lie only in one town. About ten
years ago Japanese soldiers wore Hideous iron masks, and carried
bows, and foreign ministers could not traverse the streets of tbe
capital itself without a strong guard. Now, although in the interior of
the country you see no direct evidence of the foreign influence, you
can, if provided with a passport, travel alone with perfect safety, and
indeed receiving more courtesy from the people than is the case in
any other country with which I am acquainted. In the towns, of
course, direct foreign influence is noticeable at every turn. The
officials are dressed in European dress, the police are European in
appearance, the French light infantry bugle marches are heard in the
neighbourhood of all the barracks. From the French having drilled
the army and the English the marines, the latter have all the British
stolidity of their teachers, while the sentries of the guards at the gate
of the Mikado’s gardens strut up and down cuddUng their rifles, or
stand with their feet astraddle, in exactly the way in which, under
the Empire, the Zouaves used to stand at the Tuileries gates. The
bugles of the guards make day as horrible in the neighbourhood of
the castle, as do the drums and flfes of the marines in the neighbour-
hood of the port.

English influence, of course, draws certain evils in its train.
Birmingham metal work, cut-glass decanters, gingham umbrellas,
and hideous boots and felt hats are spreading in the towns, and it has
been my unfortunate fate to see an ex-Daimio dressed in a ready-
made coat, driving a gig, and to behold tho^detestable suburban villa,
near Tokio, in which another lives. At the same time, Japanese art
has not yet been killed by English ** taste.” The show-rooms of the
former palace of the Mikado at Kioto, even the tiger room in which
the Mikado used to sleep, are surpassed by the marvellously lovely
wall pictures of the rooms in the priest’s house, at the temple on the
Tokaido, near where the Enoshima path turns off, at Fujisawa.
These are, I believe, but a few years old, and they certainly show no
falling off from the work of the best period. There is one room of
birds in a snow-storm, one of processions on a gold ground, one of
egrets, and one — this last being the most beautiful— of flights of
kittiwake gulls settling on or rising off the sea, while hundreds light
and run along the sands. Many of the new screens in black, brown,
and white, with no colour introduced except in the plumage of birds,
much of the work in mixed metals applied to belts and other articles
manufactured for the European market, the application of enamel to
objects also produced for Europe, and such books as the new Nautical
Almanac (in which even tables of logarithms are made artistic by
the exquisite copper-plate engraving of the Japanese characters), on
delicate mulberry-leaf paper, compare favourably with the productions
of the best days of Japanese art.

436

BKOIISH imFLXTEKGE IN JAPAN.

Old Japan, as far as costume and social observances are concerned,
may be compared witb revolutionaiy Japan at tbe theatres, where are
played interminable historic dramas, wholly based on the old state of
things. Nothing has been changed in the Japanese theatre except,
here and there, the hours ; most of the theatres at the capital, and all
those in the interior, play from 9 a.m. until dark. The theatres of
the treaty ports now play from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m., so that at Tokio one
is able to attend the theatre at most hours of the day and night.
There the two-sworded Samurai still walk the stage, and Tycoon’s
soldiers still wear their hideous masks, and Daimios in magnificent
trousers, preceded and followed by their banners and processions of
retainers, still force the people to prostrate themselves in the dust.

In contrast to the conservatism of the theatres, the critical modem
spirit is shown in the tea-houses which stand near them. There a
common caricature sheet upon the walls, which dates from just before
the revolution, represents a Daimio’s procession of insects. The
praying mantis, the locust, the grasshopper and the wasp are
brought into requisition, given two swords a piece, and made to bear
heraldic banners of comfiower, poppy and convolvulus. They imitate
the swaggering walk and arms akimbo of the Samurai, and escort a
feeble cricket carried in a cage. This is the Daimio, before whom a
humble cockroach, who figures the people of Japan, reverently
hammers his head upon the ground as ho beholds him pass. Those
Japanese who best knew their countrymen before the revolution, will
tell you that there has always been a want of respect, other than
enforced respect, among the people. Their attitude towards the
Mikado seems to be the only exception to their general want of
veneration, which is accompanied by a total absence of religious
fanaticism, and, I think must be added, of religious reverence. The
only temple in Japan inside which I ever saw a crowd, unless there
was a wrestling performance going on within the walls, was that of
Asaksa, in the capital. This temple is the centre of a sort of fair, (ff,
as the whole of Tokio resembles the fair of St Cloud more than it
does anything else in Europe, the centre of a fair within a fair — ^the
wax-work show and big drum portion of the fair. The temple of
Asaksa is entirely surrounded by peep-shows and shooting-galleries,
and is always crowded, but more I think by sight-seeing country
people out of curiosity, than by the people of the capital from religious
motives. The Loo Choo envoys were there at the time of my visit
— ^tall, bearded, solemn men, who seemed much struck by finding the
place of honour in the temple occupied by a gigantic looking-glass.
The mirror may properly find a place in either Buddhist or Shintoo
temple. The doctrine of Pure Shintoo informs us that the Sun
Goddess was enticed out of her dark cave by a looking-glass ; but in
Bu^Uiism the looking-glass symbolises the mirror of the soul, and

ENGLISH INPLUENCE IN JAPAN.

487

the worshippers are supposed to repair to it as to a confessional. The
young ladies with painted lips, and light blue or crimson satin obis,
who eye themselves approvingly in the great mirror at Asaksa,
perhaps think that it has other objects — at all events, there is
nothing in the temple that draws so well. In a ghastly repre-
sentation of the Buddhist hell, which is moved by clockwork and
forms one of the most popular peep-shows outside the temple, the
mirror also figures, and on it their crimes are shown to the dead as
they enter hell. As I have named this show I may add that, if it
was regarded seriously by the people, it would be evidence of the
existence of a degrading superstition. It represents green devils
with red tongues, and red devils with green tongues, pounding people
in mortars, boiling them in oil and frying them upon gridirons. In
one eorner an assistant devil is engaged in tying the legs and armyjof
men together, and another, who stands by with a plumb-line and
crayon, marks a black line down the middle of their backs for the
guidance of a third, who saws them deliberately in half. As is seen,
however, by the attitude of the spectators, the representation is
regarded by the Japanese as a mere joke.

The religious indifference of the Japanese leads to singular results.
I saw one day, in the commercial summary of a trade journal, this
paragraph : — ‘‘ Bronze. — The export of this metal has greatly in-
creased, as, owing to the religious reforms of the Japanese Govern-
ment, old idols and temple bells are being very largely sold.'^ The

old idols ” of course mean Buddhas. The Government could never
have acted as it has done, had the hearts of the people really been
in their Buddhist faith. At the same time, I have a doubt as to
whether the Japanese ruling classes, although they seek to establish
Shintooism as the religion of the people, arc themselves Shintooists
any more than they are Buddhists. I have a strong unpression that
a fact remarked by me in the Mikado’s palace at Xiyoto, that the
sole decoration of the grand hall of state consists of portraits of the
Chinese philosophers, means that the Mikados themselves, spiritual
heads of the Shintoo church — I had almost said divine heads —
though they were, held Confucian tenets.

It is not only in religion that the Japanese show much pliancy.
The questions at issue between the government of the Tycoon and
that of the Mikado during the civil war were more than personal
questions, and ran through religion, principles of government, and
modes of thought, yet the leading men of the Tycoon’s government
have been very generally employed by the government which suc-
ceeded to the imperial power.

One short story of the war will illustrate several statements that I
have made.

In 1874 an American officer gave a dinner party in Japan. His

438

ENGLIBH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

guests were a Mr. C , a Southerner, Enomoto, now Japanese

ambassador at St. Petersburg, and Eurota. Enomoto had com-
manded the last force of the Tycoon, eight years ago, and had after-
wards been the chief man in the short-lived Japanese republic pro-
claimed at the northern island by the Gl^coon’s troops, after their
master’s fall. So sudden had been the change in a single year, that
Enomoto had had under his command French ofSicers who had
entered the service of the then all-powerful Emperor,” and who
almost immediately had found that they were serving in a rebel
army. Enomoto had had under his orders the steam yacht Emperor^
presented to the Tycoon by the Queen of England, and thus sud-
denly become a rebel ship. Eurota had been the general command-
ing the Mikado’s forces at the siege of the last town which Enomoto
held. In the last days of the siege Eurota had sent delicacies to the
table of the rival general, and Enomoto had returned the compliment
by sending a great work on military engineering to the general —
as some say that he might be at no disadvantage in his siege opera-
tions, but, as others explain, in order that the very valuable work,
of which there was no other copy, should not be lost to the common
country in the fires which might attend the storm of the town.
The dinner of 1874 took place at Hakodadi, which was the town in
question.

Eurota, in the course of conversation, turning to Colonel W.,
said, *‘Why, only ten years ago you and Mr. C. were fighting
against each other in Texas ! ”

Colonel W. at once replied, “ Why, only six years ago you and
Enomoto were fighting against each other at this very place ! ”

Ah, yes,” said Eurota, but in Japan it’s different.”

Thorough as, to European ideas, has been the forgive-and-forget
in America, it has been even more complete in Japan.

The courtesy in war, which is noticeable in the story I have just
told, is characteristic of the Japanese. Those who would know that
people should read the official narrative of the military expedition
to Formosa in 1874. It is a romantic history, which cannot but
awake a desire to make acquaintance with the dashing soldiers who
bore so cheerfully the hardships of that rough campaign, and with
the ministers — Soyesima, Okuma, and Okubo — ^who gained a diplo-
matic triumph over no less acute a master of statecraft than Prince
Eung himself. If I had not known the utter fearlessness of the
Japanese, I should have been tempted to believe, from the first part
of the narrative, that they were afraid of entering on the active
operations of the war. It was only their politeness. After landing
twenty thousand men to avenge the cutting off the heads of some
Japanese sailors, they sent embassy after embassy to the Formosan
chie& to get them to explain the exact reason why the mein’s heads

ENGLISH INFLT7ENCE IN JAPAH.

439

had been cut off, and it was only when the Formosans, growing
impatient, cut off the heads of some of these envoys, that the
Japanese proceeded to punish them by the destruction of their forts
and towns.

Not only the proceedings of the Formosan, but those in the matter
of the threatened Corean Expedition, are of interest, as revealing
, the real opinions of the Japanese upon foreign affairs. The leaders
in the native newspapers, at the time when war with Corea seemed
likely, give the most pleasing view of the enlightenment, and of the
courage and spirit of the Japanese. The Sochi Shimbun^ which
opposed the war, wrote as follows : —

Were wo still in a state of barbarism all the money of the nation would be
spent for war purposes. But in an advanced condition of civilisation the
strength of the nation must depend on the progress of knowledge. If our
statesmen were now to urge that increased provision for war should rank os of
greater moment than the improvement of our judicial system, or the education
of our people, they would exhaust the treasury and after all wo should not
be able to resist a power like that of England. What is necessary for our
country is power in the people, which must come from the spread of that
knowl^ge, which is really power, rather than from the making of provision
against war.”

In another article the Sochi Shimhun said, —

** Some writers argue that the sending of an army against Corea is to gain
renown for Japan abroad, and that oven the enlightened countries of Europe
extend their prestige by force of arms. But is it not a shallow notion of
these critics to imagine that Japan will gain renown abroad from an expedition
against Corea P If we insist on raising our prestige by arms, let us first of all
chastise the encroachments of Bussia. The truth, however, is that the pres-
tige of Japan is not at present to bo raised by arms. We ai’e still unable to
freely exercise our jurisdiction. On this account our Japanese brethren are
constantly exposed to wrongs to which they ought not to be exposed, and
foreigners escape punishment which they ought not to escape. We believe that
the day which gives back to Japan her rights in these respects will be the
day that will raise our national prestige.”

On the other hand the Akebono Shimhun wrote in the following
terms : —

Our army and navy are small, and the treasury is not full. But on inde-
pendent country must, when forced to do so, protect its rights, and, if the
worst comes to ^o worst, bo prepared to fight even such countries as England
and France.”

As I have said much in praise of the Japanese Government, I
must, on the other hand, state that I am reminded by this mention
of the native newspapers, that the new men who rule the country
show a great impatience of the criticism of the Press. They have
established an unwise and severe press-gagging law, and they
have induced Sir Harry Farkes to issue an order of doubtM
legality, making the publication of Japanese newspapers by Britidi

440

ENGLISH INFLUENCE iN JAPAN.

Biibj0ctB in treaty ports an offence punishable* by imprisonment.
This order confiscated a property already establishedi encouraged the
Japanese in a foolish course^ and made that a crime for Englishmen
at Yokohama which is no crime for Englishmen at Shanghai and
'Oanton. The authorities at Tokio would certainly like to reach Mr.
Wirgman, the gifted correspondent of the Illmtrated London Netcs,
who in his Yokohama Punchy published, fortunately for him, in
English, represented, during my stay at Tokio, the Japanese home
minister toasting editors upon a gridiron in presence of grim legions
of spectacled Japanese police.

I cannot trust myself to write at length of what I saw in the
interior, for I should, in the enthusiasm which seizes all who travel
in Japan, be tempted to re-describe manners and scenes which have
been described already. My most interesting trip was the last I
made — one with a charming companion, a bank manager from Hiogo,
to the feudal castle of Akashi. This was a trip not only full of
pleasure, but full of interest, from its bearing on the changes which
so suddenly have fallen on the country of the Rising Sun. Leav-
ing Iliogo-Kobe by the Tokaido, or great high road of the Eastern
Sea, of which I had already seen long stretches, between Osaka and
Xiyoto, between Kiyoto and Ijake Biwa, and nearer to the capital,
the first spot of interest to which we came was an ancient battle-
field, in scenery resembling that of Cannes. A grove of giant pine-
trees stands on the sea shore, at the entrance to the inland sea by the
lovely Akashi Straits. Here the northern and southern barons met
in battle seven hundred years ago, and to this day the population of
the neighbouring villages, wholly unrelated to the men who fell, pile
little heaps of stones upon each grave. Passing the new fortifications
of the Straits, and a fine ancient Buddha seated gravely in their rear,
we soon came to our feudal town. The Tokaido separated the town
proper from the houses of the Samurai, retainers of the family of
Akashi. The houses looking towards the Samurai dwellings, and
consequently towards the castle, had their windows screeneS with
boards to prevent the prying of any Peeping Tom. The good old
Tories who inhabit them have not been tempted even by the revolu-
tion to take down these inconvenient and ugly screens. The Samu-
rai town is not unlike a strong Maori pah. From the outside, the
houses cannot bo seen. Each opening in a long mud wall is covered
by another wall, from which defenders could fire upon an advancing
foe. At the back of each house is a large garden in which rice could
b^ grown during a blockade. Here once lived the swaggering swash-
bucklers who, with arms akimbo and with two swords apiece stuck
horizontally across their chests, used to march to Yeddo yearly with
their lord whten he went to the Tycoon’s capital for his enforced
residwee/’ and fight the retainers of the other princes in the streets.

ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

44^1

Wide roads start from the Tokaido here and there as though to lead
to Akashi Castle, but they lead but to a maze inside a hornet’s nest ;
and conduct the stormcrs only to a loop-holed wall or to a moat.
The real entrances to the castle are at the side and rear, and there
four lines of fortifications lurk among the trees, with gates that are
very Gibraltars of stone, while the keep surmounts a lofty rock.
Behind the castle is a lovely park run wild, in which are glissanies
with stems as large as one’s thigh, growing from tree to tree, and
lacing round the giant camclias and the tall bamboos. Tree-ducks
fly from every old pine stem about the hawking-pond, across which
flit kingfishers innumerable, their bright plumage showing even in
the dense green shade. Near the fortress is a shrine containing a
little Buddha ; shrine and priest’s house both deserted for five years,
and the very mats, fine and valuable though they are, left upon the
floors unstolen, as arc the pictures on the walls. No J apanese are ever
seen within the grounds : either they think them haunted, or their
respect for the fallen Daimio is too great, for J apanese are not like
other dwellers in picturesque places, unaware of the beauties that
surround them. They love the picturesque; they are the only
people who plant in their fields double fruit trees for the beauty of
their bloom ; and it is only their new government that has the van-
dalism to cut great trees. A fortified solitude is the best name
for Akashi as it stands. Is the revolution popular in such a feudal
town as this ? It was the Mikado’s birthday when I was there, and
the national flag of the just-risen sun was hoisted upon every house.
That this, however, was the result of a police decree, and not spon-
taneous, was clear from the fact that in the smaller villages of the
neighbourhood, where there are no police, not a flag was up. The
feudal princes spent, of course, much money in their chief towns.
The ex-Daimio of Akashi, before whom eight years ago the people
used to crawl, and who had power of life and death, is now living at
Tokio in European style, while his retainers have been drafted into
the foot guards.

In every journey in the interior it is of interest to note how far
foreign influence is seen. Indirectly it is there, because the revolu-
tion was European, and the revolution is there. You no longer meet
two-sworded warriors ; you no longer see the people bowing to the
earth before their princes ; — that is all. Even the hats and boots
and umbrellas of the treaty-ports have not yet appeared, and clogs
or sandals, picturesque top-knots, and cotton head-rags, and pretty
paper sunshades are still the order of the day. You sometimes see
the telegraph ; and in villages big enough to possess a book-shop
you will find Japanese books on foreign countries in great abundance,
with cuts of the Capitol at Washington, Wentworth-Wodehouse, the
Tower of London, Chatsworth, George Washington, Louis Napoleon,

VOL. XX. N.S. H H

44d

BNanSH INFLUENCE IN JAPAN.

Madame Patti, and President Grant. The traveller finds evidence of
a desire to learn English existing on all sides, and the Japanese
already know more English than do our Indian subjects. Still, this
wish to learn a foreign tongue is nothing new in Japan. Chinese
has been worked at for ages in an aimless way. Chinese characters
are used out of pedantry in books, although the easier Japanese
characters have to be printed at the side. At a peep-show in the
capital I found all the explanations, out of politeness, in the Chinese
character alone, which few of the visitors understood. The intellectual
and social debt of Japan to China is a subject of some interest in
itself. Japan bears to China in civilisation the relation that Sweden
bears to Germany. In the Middle Ages, Japan borrowed from China,
as Sweden borrowed from Germany, many of the externals of her
civilisation, but she kept, as Sweden kept, a national life alive
beneath. To return to the language question, at all the temples
receiving State aid are English and French inscriptions warning
visitors not to fish in the ponds, and not to shoot birds in the trees,
even where the temples are situated in parts of the interior seldom
visited by foreigners, and never by any who cannot understand
Japanese. The English of Japan is not at present very good. There
are two guide-books to the ancient capital, Eiyoto, written in English
by Japanese. The one calls Buddhas ‘‘ idles,'' and the other calls
them ^^idoles." Among the statements in these books are the
following: — ^'It had been burnt to the ground by thunderlight
twenty-nine years ago.” Biyodoin : — ^it was in this temple that a
most brave general named Yorimasa suicided there 694 years ago.”

Mumenomiya was built for honour of a virtious person — at ancient,
one thousand and twenty-six years ago.” ‘‘ Narabigaoka is named
80 because the hills stand very peticulairly after one another.”

Whatever may be our doubts as to the extent of the foreign
influence, we can have none as to the loveliness of Japan, and the
delight of travelling in the interior. When I left the country I had
seen seven out of the eight largest towns ; but it is not the weeks in
the cities that live in my recollection, but the few days spent in the
country districts. Japan is the traveller's paradise. Through a
strange medley of pines and palms, of rice and buckwheat, of bamboos
and elms, of tea and cotton ; through azalea thickets and camelia
groves, across tobacco fields and past rocks covered with evergreen
ferns of a hundred kinds, and crowned with grotesque remains;
through tussac grass and forests of scarlet maple, and over mountains
clad in rich greenery, you may journey in perfect peace, safe from
robbery, safe from violence, safe even from beggars, never troubled,
never asked for anything, except by a civil policeman for your pass*
poirt^ and that with the lowest of low bows. The maidens say ** Ohio ”
uweetly'to you in the villages as you pass, where eight years ago you

ENaLISH INFLI7EE0E IE JAPAE.

443

might have been sliced up by the sharp swords of the Samurai.
** Ohio/’ too, call the labourers in the fields^ leaving their work to
come and bow at the roadside; not as the Javanese bow to the
Dutch^ but with the bow of equal to equals the bow of infinite
politeness. Without servant or interpreter, a European can travel
in safety throughout the land.

The people and their houses have been described too often. One
cannot but love their fun, their cleanliness, their inborn sense of art.
It is impossible to realise that the Japanese are real men and women.
What with the smallness of the people, their incessant laughing
chatter, and their funny gestures, one feels one’s self in elf-land. On
a fine day, the men appear as grinning demons in black tights,
streaked all over with blue heraldry. On wet days, the long rush
coats and long-sided straw hats equally remove all vestige of
humanity. When we turn over Japanese pictures in our English
homes we fancy that both the faces and the dress must be unlike
real life. On the contrary, they are very like the old fashions of
the wealthy class, with whom faces are as much made up, and are
as much a matter of fashion as are clothes. It is the country people
of Japan who are my elves — ^the tiny, jovial, copper-coloured poor.
Were I describing rural Japan at length, I would try to show that
it may be looked at from a point of view from which it has not as
yet been much considered. Japan is the last refuge of the Joyous
Life. See the Thames on a fine Saturday in July, or the fair of St.
Cloud on the last Sunday evening of its reign, and you may for a
moment believe that even in Europe the Joyous Life is not extinct ;
but the fun of the Thames is vulgar, and the loose morals of St.
Cloud are venal. The Joyous Life of the Middle Ages may have
been bad or good — in Europe it is gone, and let us speak well of the
dead — ^but it was ' neither venal nor vulgar ; that life lives stiU in
Japan, where no paganism of antique grandeur dwells, but rollicking,
imthinking fun. All who love children must love the Japanese, the
most gracious, the most courteous, and the most smiling of all
peoples, whose rural districts form, with Through-the-Looking-
Glass-Country and Wonderland, the three kingdoms of merry
dreams.

Charles Wentworth Dilke.

H K 2

. WILLIAM GODWIN. '

One of Hazlitt’s best essays reports a discussion as taking place at
Lamb’s supper-table, upon tbe men whom one would most like to
Lave met. If tho selection were to be confined to the literary con-
stellations which have shone and been extinguished in England, there
are few sets to which one would rather have had an admission than
that of which Lamb was himself the centre. No sufficient Boswell
has reported its wit combats, and wo must reconstruct from our
imaginations as best we may the superabundant pomp of Coleridge’s
monologues, and Wordsworth’s sententious prosings, and Hazlitt’s
keen sarcasms, and Lamb’s quaint by-play of humour relieved
by outrageous puns. Of each of these, indeed, and of some lesser
lights, we can form a tolerable picture from independent sources, but
there is one figure who has always hitherto appeared under a veil.

It is hard to attribute any distinct personality to Godwin. Talfourd
describes him as a man with the massive head of a giant set upon a
low frame, and discoursing in a small voice, and with an almost
finical manner, upon trivial topics. The presence of the most
interesting companions could not prevent him from falling into a
profound after-dinner sleep. Strangers who came to see the most
daring of political speculators, and the author of what would now be
called the most sensational of novels, were taken aback by this con-
trast to their preconceived notions. The bodily presence was mild,
if not contemptible. They came out to see a prophet, and found
but a reed shaken by tho wind. Godwin’s oddly divided career,
indeed, might prepare us for some such peculiarities. Its end holds
no proportion with its beginning. The man who beganrby pub-
lishing, in tho heat of the French revolution, treatises which
expressed the extreme form of revolutionary principles, eked out a
livelihood in later years by publishing good little books for children,
and ended life as yeoman usher of the Exchequer. It was a strange
fate for the pupil of Rousseau, Helv^tius, and Holbach and the rival of
Condorcet, to owe his last gleam of comfort to the Duke of Wellington
and Lord Melbourne. A similar contrast appears in his domestic
relations. Godwin is probably remembered at the present day chiefly as
the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the father-in-law of Shelley.
Their fiery natures influenced, but scarcely disturbed the placid
tenor of his existence ; and Godwin had to wear out near forty years
after parting from the passionate affection of his wife, and near four-
teen' after losing his son-in-law, before he too made an exit almost

WILLIAM GODWIN.

415

tpnoticed by the noisy world. He bad, one may say, outlived
himself, and would have perhaps left a deeper impression if his days
had been shortened by half. Had he died with his wife, we should
have speculated on what he might have been. As it is, his later
years cast a partial shadow of oblivion over his earUer activity.

Godwin left behind him voluminous papers ; for he appears to
have cherished the superstition, only too popular, which forbids*'
the destruction of written documents. Some people seem to fear,
rather superfluously, that the Dryasdusts of the future' will not have
work enough upon their hands. The correspondence and the journals
have been used by Mr. Paul for the construction of a biography.^
Mr. Paul has used them with great judgment, and has erred, if
he has erred at all, upon the right side. , Nearly all that he has
published is interesting, though possibly the interest might have
been increased by a little more use of independent materials. That
defect, however, if it be a defect, can be supplied by the reader. We
know, in general terms, what impression Godwin made upon his
contemporaries; and now that we have a full selection from his
letters, he ought to start out into stereoscopic distinctness of relief.
And yet, it must be said that ho still seems half to elude our notice.
There are many interesting documents in these volumes : there are
some admirable letters from Coleridge; a few characteristic notes
from Lamb ; and an account of Mary WoUstonecraft and her family
which may serve as a complete portrait of one of the most interesting
figures in the Godwun circle. It is enough to say here, that Mr.
Paul has a warm admiration for this lady, and vindicates her
triumphantly from the charge of having rebelled against established
conventions simply because those conventions were trammels to vice.
She was plainly a woman of much noble feeling and high aspirations:
if her conduct was not irreproachable, and a vein of shrill declamation —
too often associated Tiith her favourite cause — mingles disagreeably
with her eloquence, we must forgive much to a woman thrown from
an early age upon her own resources ; yet fighting the hard battle of
life with high courage and generously helping her fellow-sufferers.
And yet, I must confess that I am more attracted by Godwin’s
(fid Calvinistic mother, who sticks by her son for fifty years in spite
of his freethinking, and writes queer letters from her country retire-
ment, full of bad spelling, sound sense, scripture texts, praises of her
favourite minister, and lists of market prices, the whole sometimes
^‘enclosed in a goose.” Her genuine human nature contrasts
pleasantly with the philosophical sentimentalism of her son’s circle.
When Godwin recommends a hypochondriacal youth at Cambridge to
study ‘‘Seneca the philosopher,” andoJdMrs. Godwin says of agood-

(1) Williain Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries. By C. Kegan Paul. King
and Co.

446

WILLIAM GODWIN.

&r-*nQ thin g son of liers^ ** Seneca’s morals he bostes off is not su£Bi-
cient/’ I somehow fancy that the old lady is most nearly in the right.

If the figures in the background persist in being more distinct
than the principal character, the fault is not with Mr. Paul. He
has done what can be done to bring his principal figure into relief :
but Godwin, though we gradually gain some acquaintance with him,
was wanting in the force and richness of character which keeps the
dead alive. In many men diffidence is merely a veil, behind which lies
the most genuine vigour ; Godwin’s diffidence lies at the root of his
character. He was not merely shy in company, but shy when he was
alone. The power was defective, as well as the disposition to exert his
powers. Mr. Paul, who is not infected by the ordinary biographer’s
mania, says of him that, except in his one great love, “ friendship
stood to him in the place of passion, os morality was to him in the
room of devotion.” He was a man, in short, of tepid affections, who
could be amiable, but not devoted. This, it may be said, is what wo
might expect from a man in whom, as Talfourd says, the faculty
of abstract reasoning so predominated over all others as practically

to extinguish them He had no imagination, no fancy, no wit,

no humour.” Ho was, that is, philosophy incarnate. And yet this
seems to be unjust on one side to philosophers, and on another to
Godwin. The philosopher should not really be a man without
passions, but a man in whom the calmer and more voluminous
passions are developed at the expense of the narrow and violent. He
should be deeply sympathetic to the great currents of human thought
and feeling, though not easily disturbed by comparatively super-
ficial perturbations. Not does it seem fair to say of Godwin that he
was entirely without imagination, when we remember that he was the
author of a novel, almost unique in its kind ; a novel which, if it is
devoid of many more common charms, can never, as Hazlitt says,
be begun without being finished, nor finished without stomping itself
upon the memory of the reader. Godwin, we shall find on deamina-
tion, has a distinctive, though not a highly-coloured character.

Godwin’s life (1756 — 1836) divides with the century ; or we may
say that he lived in the eighteenth, and only survived in the nine-
teenth century. The first part of his history culminates with the
marriage to Mary WoUstonecraft (1797) ; the second opens with his
marriage to Mrs. Clairmont (1801). If the first marriage was the
appropriate reward of a career of intellectual rebellion, the second
tended materially to clip his wings, and confine him to the regions of
the' commonplace. In his earlier history Godwin represents a typical
process in English political history. He began as a Dissenter to end
as a full-blown radical in religion and politics. In his boyhood he
was a Calvinist, with a leaning towards the special-Calvinism of
Sandeman. The influence of the most eminent of the dissentersi

WILLIAM GODWIN.

447

Priestley, led hiin to Socimanism. An acquaintance with writers of
the French school developed his Socinianism to complete infidelity,
if not to dogmatic atheism. When the French revolution broke
out a year or two later, Godwin, who had long given up preaching
for literature, was fuUy qualified to expound the political creed of
which Priestley, Price, and Paine, all of them dissenters by birth,
were the most conspicuous English advocates. The Political
Justice, which appeared in 1793, is the most thoroughgoing English
version of the gospel according to Eousseau, and indeed goes beyond
his teachers. Caleb Williams, intended by its author to be an
attack upon the existing social order, followed in the next year.
When the English Government made its ill-advised attempt to sup-
press freethinking in politics by the prosecution of Home Tooke,
Hardy, and Thelwall, Godwin took an active part in defending them
by his pen and by his personal appearance. Had the trial resulted
differently, the author of Political Justice would certainly have
been in a dangerous position. Godwin’s reputation and character
won favour in the eyes of Mary’ WoUstonecraft, herself already
known by the Vindication of the Eights of Woman. Even in his
relations to his first wife, there appears something of Godwin’s
characteristic preference of reason to passion. He kept a separate
establishment on principle, and in one of her last letters to him there
is a complaint of the ** icy philosophy ” which had caused a moment-
ary chill. But their love seems to have been strong and genuine.
Godwin’s description of their brief happiness is touching and manly.
We feel that his philosophizing is for once but a thin veil over deep
emotion. We pardon an affectation which is but the ostensible
apology made by his heart to his intellect. Mary Godwin, however,
died in giving birth to their only child, and the romance of Godwin’s
life disappears along with her.

His grief was for a time overwhelming, but within a few months
we find him addressing another lady in love letters which Mr. Paul
justifiably pronounces to bo unique. He occupies many pages in
arguing most lucidly against Miss Lee’s religious prejudices.
He shows to his own complete satisfaction that a Christian can
have no logical ground for refusing to marry an infidel. He
proves to demonstration that a lady should inquire into her lover’s
morals, but not into his creed. Miss Lee to his surprise refused
to yield to demonstration. Next year we find Godwin employing
his logic with equal fervour and equal wont of success against a lady
who thought that she ought not to accept him within a month of her
husband’s death. A year or two later Godwin had to learn that the
weapon on which he prided himself was not more trustworthy in
defensive than in offensive operations. One evening a lady exclaimed
to him from her own window as he sat in his balcony, Is it possible
that I behold the immortal Godwin ? ” Godwin’s logic was defence-

448

WILLUM GODWIN.

less against flattery, and within a few months he fell a yictim to this
enterprising widow, who became a ** querulous though always
admiring wife,” but “a harsh and unsympathetic stepmother.”
Pecuniary troubles followed. Godwin had always lived by his pen.
He had counted on the success of a tragedy, which failed igno-
miniousljr just before his marriage. To meet the expenses of his
family he had to descend to mere bookmaking, and he failed to
retrieve matters by becoming also a publisher. Difliculties thickened
as the years went by, and Godwin became a greater proficient in the
demoralising trade of respectable begging. It was, indeed, one of
his theories that rich men ought to support poor men of genius, and
he regarded subscriptions rather as proper tributes from his intel-
lectual subjects than as implying a relation of dependence on his
side. He took the money much as Comte in later years took the
subscriptions of the faithful, but he had not, like Comte, any new
revelations to promise. His later essays soften, if they do not
retract, the opinions of his earlier writings, and were not of a kind
to make much impression upon a world which had changed more
rapidly than himself.

Begging, even on the loftiest principles, is not an elevating occupa-
tion ; and there are some symptoms of deterioration in Godwin’s
character. He is rather querulous for a philosopher. That, indeed,
is not very surprising. A moderate experience in the critic’s trade
will convince any one that nobody is so irritable as your thoroughly
candid man. He is so plainly in the right that one who finds fault
with him must be monstrously unreasonable. Godwin was there-
fore sensitive to criticism from early years ; and it is no wonder if,
in later life, with an uneasy family, and under continual difficulties,
he should have become peevish and fretful. The habit of covering
his irritability under a cloak of candour comes out oddly in many of
Godwin’s letters. After describing Hayley very unfavourably in
one of them, he adds, Damn him. I say this in the sobriety
of my judgment, and without a spice of resentment.”^ Godwin
damns a good many people pretty heartily on these terms. He
quarrelled more or less persistently with most of his friends — with
Mackintosh, Parr, Holcroft, and even for a time w'ith Lamb. His
unreasonable love of reasoning must have been as amusing in his
literary relations as in his love affairs. Some letters which passed
between him and Kemble, on the occasion of his unfortunate theatrical
ventures, exhibit him as one of that inconvenient race — tho authors
who invite criticism, but think that criticism, if hinted, is an imper-
tinence, and, if detailed, an insult. A very curious bit of self-
aaafysis^ shows that he was even morbidly alive to the faults of
character in which these weaknesses were rooted. He describes
(1) Vol. ii., p. 189. (2) Vol. i., p. 358.

WILLIAM GODWIN.

449

even too strongly liis strange diffidence, his want of tact and sym-
pathy, his coldness of temperament, and the awkward contrast
between his daring as a thinker and his weakness in active life.
The confession explains sufficiently the difficulty of personal dealings
with a man whose emotions were so oddly masked by his reason or
concealed under diffidence. And yet he was fundamentally amiable,
as appears most prominently in his relations to women and youths.
In early life he asked his sister to choose a wife for him, and dis-
cussed the lady whom she suggested with the deliberation of a
diplomatist of the old school. I have already noticed the queer
mixture of passion and argument, or rather the substitution of argu-
ment for passion, in his later love-letters; yet wo are told that
when his first marriage was announced two ladies shed tears. The
singular letters written by one of these ladies, Mrs. Inchbald, seem
to imply that her love was changed by the disappointment into
something very like spite. Even on the occasion of Godwin’s great
loss, she replies to his appeal for sympathy by insulting remarks
about tho woman he had lost, and proposes to break off their
acquaintance for ever. He sent her his play a year or two later,
and she congratulated him on attaining a place among the
honoured few who, during the last century, have entirely failed in
writing for the stage.” ^ A partial reconciliation seems to have
taken place afterwards ; but Mrs. Inchbald’s persistent bitterness is
perhaps as strong a proof as others of a less disagreeable kind, that
Godwin could bo verj’^ charming to some women. Perhaps they
recognised the general kindliness and loftiness of feeling which lay
beneath his external foibles ; female society might thaw his habitual "
diffidence. I^erhaps, too, it is time that women generally like
priggishness and conceit.

Another peculiarity of Godwin’s is more conspicuous. One
marked peculiarity of his whole life was the influence which
he exerted over young men. Shelley is only one, though by
far the most celebrated, of tho ingenuous admirers who found
in him a temperate and kindly adviser, and believed in him
with the hero-worship of youth. The influence was perhaps
owing in part to Godwin’s amazing confidence in the power of
reasoning. When we have grown up, we begin to resent argfu-
ment. Wc have made up our minds and don’t want to be assailed
by a battery of syllogisms directed against our most cherished
principles. But a young man is naturally sensitive to the implied
compliment, when a reputed philosopher deals with him as a reason-
able being. Godwin really acts up to his principles and tries to
convince his young friends, instead of overawing them by authority.
When Shelley, still a lad without fame, wont off to Ireland and
proposed to reform mankind out of hand, most men would have set

(1) Vol. ii., p. 77.

450

mUlAH GODWIN.

liuii down as a crackbrained entbusiast. Godwin reasons with him
gravely and sensibly. You say,’* he writes, what has been done
within the last twenty years ? 0 that I could place you upon the

pinnacle of ages from which these twenty years would shrink to an
invisible point ! It is not after this fashion that moral causes work
in the eye of him who looks profoundly through the vast and — allow
me to add — ^venerable machine of human society.” Such advice
might come with a good grace from one of the few men who had
never justified the revolutionary violence with which his principles
were associated, nor been frightened by the violence into disavowing
the principles. He might fairly represent to the youthful imagina-
tion the ideal philosopher, fixed in his opinions, mild in applying
them, and anxious to conquer by the fairest of weapons.

Moreover, all Gbdwin’s writings are really marked by elevation
of tone and generosity of feeling. When he blunders, he blunders in
great measure from taking too high an estimate of the fundamental
goodness and intelligence of the species. His doctrine is lofty in
substance, and is to be propagated by worthy means. Coleridge, a
thinker of a very different school, speaks of him in 1811 (in a letter,
it is true, addressed to Godwin himself) as the philosopher who
gave us the first system in England that ever dared reveal in full
that most important of all important truths, that morality might be
built up on its own foundation, like a castle built from the rock and
on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its
roof and upper stories.” The morality thus founded on pure reason
was to win adherents by reason alone. When Godwin’s personal
merits came in question, his literary vanity was easily aroused and
the philosopher became irritable. But in speculative discussions
he is true to his principles. His belief in the power of reason is
genuine to the last. No rationalist is freer from a too common incon-
sistency. Beason is so plainly on his side that he asks for nothing
but fair play for his arguments, instead of asking, os too manyu)f us
ask, that his opponents should be treated as incapable of argument. ’He
pushes his hatred of tyranny into an extravagant hatred of all
government ; but his hatred is steady, consistent, and uncom-
promising, though never fiaming into passion. The calmness of his
temperament enables him to cultivate that rarest of all virtues, a
tolerance not founded upon indifference. Such philosophy might
well impose upon a generous and imaginative youth ; and Queen
Mab and the Bevolt of Islam may best be described as God-
winism sublimated into poetry. To many people, perhaps, it is
hardly made more readable by the change ; for I suspect that most
readers are soon wearied by Shelley’s phantasmagoric unrealities.
His &ine, however, though founded on infinitely better claims than
hxsTeproduction of Godwinism, may reflect some interest upon the
Political Justice.

imiLlAM GODWlNi

451

Godwin’s treatise in its general design reminds ns rather of
French than of English models. He is what so few Englishmen
are — a thorough-going ^^ergotist.” His treatise embodies what is
called inexorable logic. In other words it represents the really
illogical frame of mind which refuses to be shocked by a redmtio ad
dbmrdum. One principle is ridden to death. That principle is the
supremacy and all-sufficiency of reason. As a true prophet of the
ora, Godwin makes a clean sweep of all tradition. He rejects all
that implicit reason which has embodied the past experience of the
race in dumb, instinctive prejudices, without becoming articulate
in logical demonstrations. So far his affinities are distinctly French,
and, like Tom Paine, he represents the English reaction of the
French movement. But it is plain that he has sat at the feet of
other teachers. He ranks Hume with '^the most illustrious and
venerable of men ” ^ for his logical profoundness ; and it is chiefly
from Hume that he borrows his philosophical armoury. The influence
of the great sceptic is evident throughout the book. Following
Hume, he rejects the social contract and the dpnori doctrine of the
rights of man, popular with the school of Housseau. He borrows
Hume’s arguments against freewill, though perhaps not thoroughly
understanding them, and accepts Hume’s utilitarianism and his
admission of the unselfish impulses. Godwin’s philosophy, in short,
is derived from Berkeley and Hume ; his sentiment from the revolu-
tionary doctrines then triumphant in France ; but he gives a turn of
his own to the adopted materials. The main outlines of his curious
system may be briefly indicated.

All the revolutionary theories, and Godwin’s among them, start
from the assumption of human equality. Man, in their dialects,
means the colourless unit which remains when abstraction has been
made of all the peculiarities of race, government, and religion that
cause one man ta differ from anothor. This metaphysical entity,
admirably fitted to be the subject-matter of beautiful mathematical
demonstrations, is then identified with the concrete animal ; and it
is assumed that because man, stripped of all specific qualities,
must be everywhere the same, therefore men, as clothed with all
those qualities, must be the same. Thus all appeals to history and
experience may be summarily set aside as irrelevant, because refer-
ring to the accidents instead of the essence. But how are we to
determine the qualities of human nature in the abstract P for some
primitive quality must be left to afford a point of adhesion for our
logic. Godwin’s answer is again modelled upon Hume. Man is
not only devoid of innate ideas, but almost, it would seem, of
innate capacities. The mind, if there be a mind, is nothing but a
series of thoughts and sensations, which may or may not inhere in
some hypothetical substratum.^ Hence the person is entirely built
(1) ** Political Justice,” vol. ii. p. 491. (Third edition.) (2) lb., i 25.

452

WILLIAM GODWIN.

up of the yariouB ideas which have somehow cohered iu
what may or may not be a mind. We begin life without
innate principles or instincts, and though some difEerences of
animal structure must bo admitted, they are comparatively trifling.
** It is the impression that makes the man, and compared
with the empire of impression the mere differences of animal
structure are inexpressibly unimportant and powerless.”^ Large
brains are made by many thoughts, not thoughts by the brain. It
is needless to ask whether this doctrine be legitimately derived from
Hume, or should not lead to a self-destructive scepticism. Godwin
infers from it the indefinite modifiability of every human being.
The embryo man is so nearly a zero that everything which makes
the complete adult is due to the accumulation of ideas poured in
since his birth. When the process takes place legitimately it is
called reason. When illegitimately, we have the various forms of
error which produce vice in morality, tyranny in politics, and
inequality in society. We must naturally conquer error. The will
is entirely determined by opinion, if the will be anything but opinion ;
and therefore truth is omnipotent. You have nothing to do but
to exhibit to a man adequately the reasons for right conduct, and he
will inevitably adopt it. The passions, even those which have been
regarded as strongest, may be easily conquered, if only their nature
is clearly exhibited. Man, therefore, is ‘‘perfectible, or, in other
words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.’’

The morality founded upon this doctrine is utilitarian ; but not
in the ordinarv sense. The weak side of the old utilitarianism was
the necessary imperfection of its appeal to experience. In framing
a calculus of human happiness it started from the individual, instead
of the social, point of view. It tried, that is, to reckon the conse-
quences of an action, without taking into account the history of the
social organism which can alone explain its moral development.
Godwin shares this weakness. But most utilitarians started also with
the first principle that a man’s own happiness could be the only end
of his actions. Their doctrine was, therefore, identified with the
doctrine of pure selfishness, whether backed or not by some reference
to supernatural sanctions. The opposite school, which sought to
discover the moral law in pure reason, endeavoured to dispense with
any empirical test. Morality must have no reference to happiness,
to save it from degenerating into mere prudence. Godwin borrows
from both sides. He is an intellectual utilitarian. Morality, as he
reiterates, is nothing but a calculation of consequences. It is a kind
of moral arithmetic.^ That action is best which produces the
greatest sum of happiness. Vice is a wrong calculation, and virtue
a right calculation of consequences. Everard Digby thought it his
du<y to blow up King James and his parliament.^ His motives
(1) Ib., i 40. (2) Ib., i. 86. (8) Ib., i. 173. (4) Ib., i. 167.

WILLIAM GODWIN.

4S3

might include the most admirable philanthropy ; but the action was
wrong, because a right calculation would have shown him to be mis-
taken in the estimate of its consequences. Moreover, in calculating
consequences, we are bound to pay no more regard to our personal
interests than to those of any one else. If I had to choose between
saving the life of F^nclon, when employed upon his immortal
Telemachus,” and saving the life of his valet, I should clearly have
done most good by saving Fenelon ; that is, I ought to have saved
him. If I had been the valet, I ought, by the very same showing,
to have preferred my master’s life to my own. Further, if the valet
had been my brother, my father, or my benefaetor, the case
would not have been altered.^ “ Gratitude, therefore,” so far as it
implies personal considerations, ^'is no part either of justice or
virtue.” The fact that a man is my father docs not makes his happi-
ness intrinsically more valuable. It should not therefore influence
my conduct as a reasonable being. This part of Godwin’s theory
startled his contemporaries, and was abandoned at a later period by
himself. Yet it is but the logical corollary from his principles, and
Godwin scarcely saw that to abandon it was to make an admission
fatal to his system.

Thus interpreted, utilitarianism seems to be fairly obnoxious to
one of the alternative accusations generally levelled against it. It
does not sanction selfishness, but it prescribes an impossible standard
of heroism. I am to act as an angelic spectator,^ freed from all the
ties and prejudices of my condition and animated only by an
impartial desire for the happiness of all men, would wish me to act.
Every man *'is bound to consider himself a debtor in all his
faculties, his opportunities, and his industry to the general welfare.
This is a debt which must always be paying, never discharged.”
The least deviation from the path which leads to the greatest happi-
ness of the species is a crime. Every man ^‘should feel himself
obliged to scruple ” (qy. not to scruple ?) “ the laying out his
entire strength and forfeiting his life upon any single instance of
public exertion.” This is in fact the creditor and debtor theory
of Calvinism, translated into philosophy. When we have done all,
we are unprofitable servants.

Man, then, is not merely a reasonable being, but is, so to speak,
created by reason. He is hardly even the sheet of white paper, on
which experience is to write its arguments. His very tissue is itself
woven ou^ of argument. Since good arguments naturally prevail
over bad ones, man, could a hearing for the truth be secured, might be
actually constructed of right reason. Beason should be the sole
judge of truth ; the sufficient sanction of morality ; the sole agent in
regenerating society. For somehow things have gone terribly
wrong, and though man as he might be has indefinite capacities for
(1) Ib., i. 129. (2) Ib., i. 133.

4M

WILLIAM GODWIN.

wisdom and yirtuei man as lie is has been most accurately painted by
Swift.^ He is a Yahoo^ and is to be made into an angel. It has
come to pass, as a matter of fact, that society is bound together by
instincts, rather than by reasoned convictions. A modem utilitarian
might appeal to experience as showing the paramount importance
of those instincts. But with Godwin, who reasons from the nature
of man considered as a colourless unit, provided only with a capacity
for reason and for happiness, such an appeal is impossible. An
instinct is not reason, and therefore must lead to superstition
instead of science. Loyalty implies obedience not founded on
reason, and such obedience is but another name for slavery. A man
who has resigned his reason into the hands of another may be
indefinitely misled. Beason, which starts from assuming the equality
of mankind, must condemn monarchy and aristocracy, which imply
some natural inequality. Therefore, as Godwin says, “ it must be
laid down as a first principle that monarchy is an imposture.’'^ But
this is a trifie. “ Government is nothing but regulated force ; ” ®
but force is not argument, therefore all government is wrong.
^‘That any man or body of men should impose their sense upon
persons of a different opinion, is, absolutely speaking, wrong, and in
all cases deeply to be regretted ; ” though in some cases the evil,
essential to government, must be endured.'^ The cases, however, on
Godwin^s showing, would be few. Association of any kind is bad,
for even voluntary associations tend to suppress the free play of
individual sentiment.^

This simple logic makes a clean swoop of all political in-
stitutions. In an ideal country the constitution would consist
of two articles ; the first dividing it into equal electoral districts ;
the second prescribing means of electing a national assembly,
“not to say that the latter of these articles may very probably
be dispensed with.^^^ Hence, he thinks, would speedily follow
the breaking up of the empire into a confederacy of small ...re-
publics, and another “sufficiently memorable” consequence — “the
gradual extinction of law.” Even criminal law, as he argues at
length, is a blunder. The gallows is most illogical. It appeals to
fear instead of reason. “What would not man have been long
before this, if the proudest of us had no hopes but in argument P ” ^
When a man has a knife at our throats there is some excuse for
coercion. Yet even here there are doubts. “ The powers of reason
and truth are yet unfathomed.” Marius repelled the assassin by the
grandeur of his appeal. Why ehould not we P “ It would be well
for the human race if they were all in this respect like Marius, all
aoctIBtomed to place an intrepid confidence in the single energy of

(1) Godwin fireqnently refers to Swift as a great political teadier. See ii. 209.

Ib., IL '48. (3) lb., i. 230. (4) lb., i. 268. (6) lb. Book iv. chap. iii.

(6) Ib., iL 292. (7) lb., ii. p. 334.

WILLIAK GODWIN.

458

intellect/’^ But we don’t punish a man till his violence is over.
That is more illogical stiU. To punish with a view to future
restraint is abhorrent to reason.” To punish for reformation is
absurd, for reason has nothing in common with coercion, Eeason
is omnipotent; if my conduct be wrong, a very simple statement,
flowing from a clear and comprehensive view, will make it appear to
be such ; nor is it probable that there is any perverseness that would
persist in vice, in the face of aU the recommendations with which
virtue might be invested, and all the beauty in which it might bo
displayed.”®

The good simple Godwin ! After this it is a trifle to observe
that he abolishes monarchy, aristocracy, churches, armies, laws,
associations, inequality of proj)erty, and marriage. All promises /are,
in some degree, evil ; for to promise is to limit in some degree the
future exercise of my reason.^ The unalterable promise made in
marriage is specially objectionable; and Godwin observes with his
usual calmness that the abolition of the present system of marriage
appears to involve no evil.”^ It is, he says, an important question
whether in a reasonable state of society, the rule would be pro-
miscuous intercourse, or an adherence of particular pairs, so long as
they mutually agreed. He thinks the latter alternative the most
probable, because “it is the nature of the human mind to persist for
a certain length of time in its opinion or choice.”® Thus society is
finally pulverized and reduced to a mere agglomeration of indepen-
dent atoms combining and separating according to chance or the
dictates of pure reason. This result itself is happily to be brought
about, not by violence, but by the diflusion of sound reason. Modern
worshippers of Individualism may seem to be feeble plagiarists
from Godwin.

The result of applying Godwin’s principles is of course to be the
advent of the millennium. Everybody is to be good and happy.
The labours of every man for half-an-hour a day will supply the wants
of all men.® The abolition of law will lead to the disappearance of
crime. If man does not become, strictly speaking, immortal, his life
may be prolonged beyond any assignable limits,^ and we shall realise
the vision of Franklin, who expected that one day mind would
“become omnipotent over matter.”® Another consequence would
follow which excited particular attention. According to Godwin,
the population was kept down because some people acquired more
than their fair share of wealth. “ The established administration
of property,” as he put it, “ may be considered as strangling a con-
siderable proportion of our children in their cradles.”® Wallace
had suggested in a rather paradoxical pamphlet (1761), that a com-
munity of property, otherwise desirable, would lead to an intolerable

(1) Ib., u. 338. (2) lb., ii. 341 . (3) Ib., i. 196. (4) Ib., ii. 508. (5) lb., ii. 509.

(6) Ib., ii. 484. [(7) Ib., ii. 527. ;(8) lb., ii. 503. (9) lb., ii. 467.

456

WILLIiLM GODWIN.

multiplicatioii of our numbers. Godwin replied that tbe fear was
altogether premature. Three-fourths of the earth are uncultivated,
and the cultivation is at present very imperfect. Myriads of cen-
turies of increasing population may pass away, and the world be yot
found sufficient for the support of its inhabitants.’’ ^ The anticipated
evil may be left to the consideration of our wise, virtuous, and
immortal' descendants, who wiU perhaps by that time be omnipotent
over matter.

Mr. Paul speaks of Godwin as in some sense the originator of
‘‘philosophic radicalism.” The school, however, which was more
specifically known by that name, has a difierent genealogy, and was
bitterly opposed to Godwin upon this very issue. Bentham (Godwin’s
senior by some years), and his disciple, James Mill, were the leaders
of that school of thought ; and to them Godwin’s whole method was
utterly abhorrent. The question was first brought to the surface
by the essay of Malthus. After the true English fashion, Malthus
met his semi-Gallican antagonist, not by opposing to him a difierent
generalisation, but by fixing upon a particular point. The force
of Malthus’s reasoning has gained for him an established position in
political economy ; and his theory is recognised as a particular case
of Mr. Darwin’s struggle for existence. Godwin’s full reply to
Malthus was delayed till 1820 . It failed, says Mr. Paul, to excite
much attention, because the interest in Malthus had already died out.
That is doubtless true in part ; controversy had ceased ; but it is
also true that Godwin’s treatise is the weakest and most ill-tempered
of all his philosophical writings. lie seems to be quite incapable
of understanding his antagonist’s position, and sometimes argues
for him when he fancies that he is arguing against him. Godwin’s
ideas seem to have ossified in some respects, and he attacks Malthus
with a complete want of discrimination. One characteristic, how-
ever, is curious. There is an apparent inversion of positions. The
opponent of all government thinks that the ancient Peruvians must
have been a prosperous people, because all their wealth was divided
into three equal parts, of which one went to the priests, and one to
a paternal government.*^ The so-called atheist attacks the Christian
— Oobbett’s “ Parson Malthus ” — on the principles of the gospel.
“ Nature,” he tells us, “ takes more care of her works than such
irreverent authors as Mr. Malthus are apt to suppose.” ^ And the
retort, whether consistent or not, was in this case tolerably relevant.

It must be remembered, in fact, that in Malthus’s first edition the
moral check was omitted, and even in later editions was pro-
nounced to have been historically of little importance. The argu-
ment, therefore, whatever its true import, might naturally appear to
Godwin and his supporters to be equivalent to the assertion that
vice and misery were providentially ordained features in human
(1) lb., iL 61B. (2) << On Population,” p. 62. (3} Ib., 219.

WILLIAM aODWIN.

4^

society. Malthus^ in his later form, argues with irresistible force
that want of prudence must generate yice and misery. In his first
shape he seemed to deny that| as a matter of fact, men were governed
by prudence at all. So far from being the reasoning beings of
Godwin’s fancy, they were under the absolute dominion of a blind
impulse. They multiplied as the beasts multiply, and were
restrained, as the beasts are restrained, by famine, or its fore-
runners. Malthus, in fact, starts with the explicit assertion of
the principle made familiar by Mr. Darwin’s use of it and already
stated by Franklin. If it were not for the competition of other
species, said Franklin, the earth might be entirely overspread
with fennel ; and, on the same principle, by tho descendants of a
single nation. When men are brought under the same rule as other
animals, the implicit statement seems to be that men are brutes.
Malthusianism is thus the converse of Godwinism. Godwin asserts
the potential supremacy of reason ; Malthus its actual nullity. And
Malthus, in an excellent letter addressed to Godwin in these
volumes,^ indicates the application of his theories to Godwin’S whole
doctrine. The inequality of wealth, against which Godwin protests,
is necessary, according to Malthus, in order to stimulate prudence.
The competition of political economists is the struggle for existence
of naturalists. It is a necessary form of progress so long as men
partake of the animal nature, and are tempted to gratify their
passions in defiance of reason. The strongest and wisest find in it
a sufficient motive for energy, and arc enabled to hold their head6
above the mere scramble for a livelihood of the less civilised masses.
The controversy between Godwin and Malthus is thus the indication
of a deeper discord. It is the first action in the long warfare
between the political economists and the various prophets of Utopia ;
between those who, appealing to facts as they are, arc tempted to
regard the present order as final ; and those who, looking forward
to a reign of justice and happiness, arc tempted to fancy that it may
be summarily introduced in defiance of existing facts. Malthus
had clearly the best of the argument on the particular issue selected;
but tho world cannot afford to dispense with the dreamers, who, if
their speculations be futile, help at least to keep alive the enthusiasm
of humanity. That was the service which Godwin rendered in his
generation ; and the singular futility of his proposed abolition of all
social bonds should not blind us to the generous sentiment which
underlies them.

Godwin’s later essays, the Enquirer (1797) and the Thoughts
on Man (not published till 1830, though written at an earlier
period), qualify his views materially. It is one of his doctrines that
a man should always be ready to revise his opinions, for how else
can he be devoted to reason ? and he availed himself liberally of the

(1) Life, i. 321.

1 1

VOL. XX. X.S.

458

WILLIAM GODWIN.

privilege. In 1798 lie notes in a priyate memorandum^ that
wiahes to modify the Political Justice. He has not yielded a
proper attention to the empire of feeling,” nor, by consequence, to
the value of private relations ; and he wishes to admit that men
have most important differences at their birth. A happy marriage,
the best of all educations, had doubtless brought him truer views*
of the value of domestic affections; but these concessions, fairly
worked out, would have cut very deeply into his whole political
system. Unluckily he had never time or inclination to reconstruct
his theories. Soth volumes, however, contain much interesting
writing. They have Godwin^s characteristic merits. The style is
rather too smooth, and Godwin is given to terribly trite classical
illustrations after the old-fashioned model; but the st}de, if over
smooth, is lucid, and the appropriate exponent of a mind always
calm, candid, and in earnest. He argues fairly and thoughtfully ;
and even when he indulges in commonplaces, as, to say the truth,
he indulges pretty freely, his evident conviction of their importance
redeems them &om contempt. The most pleasing part, to my taste
at least, is that* which deals with education. Godwin’s sympathy
with youth is always amiable, and in education we are still most in
need of his favourite doctrine. The old brutal theories, which
treat the infant mind as a more receptacle into which ideas are to be
crammed by main stress of birch and discipline, wheth^er it be or bo
not capable of assimilating them, is not so rampant now as then ;
but it has left behind it some awkward legacies in various forms of
scholastic pedantry. Godwin urges very forcibly that the teacher
should aim at stimulating the desire for knowledge instead of
injecting knowledge ready made ; and should try to turn out youths
of five-and-twenty with teachable minds, not with minds ready to
teach the universe.^ A hint or two of this kind might be useful at
our universities. It can hardly be said, however, that Godwin’s
essays have much permanent literary value. They have almost as
little of Hazlitt’s vigour as of Lamb’s humour. An anecdote r^ted
by Hazlitt may illustrate the degree in which Godwin possessed this
last quality. When Godwin was writing the Life of Chatham,
his friend Fawcet repeated to him one of the statesman’s eloquent
perorations on the familiar text about an Englishman’s house.

The rains,” said the orator, ** might enter it, and the winds might
enter it, but the king might not.” In Gbdwin’s version this became^

** The winds of heaven may whistle round it, but the king may
not a statement revealing quite a new constitutional check.

Godwin’s two successf^ novels, Caleb Williams and St.
Lecm, are of more interest than the Essays. They seem both
(6 be connected with the speculations of the Political Justice,
(i) Ufe, L 294. (2) » The Enquirer,” p. 78.

WILLIAM aODWIN.

46Sr

Caleb WilliamB was intended^ as tbe original pre&ce declared^ to
give a general review of tbe inodes of domestic and unrecorded
despotism by wbicb man becomes the destroyer of man/’ Godwin
had himself explained sensibly enough^ though with some queer
illustrations, the obvious objection to the hybrid genus of pamphlet
novels. Homer, he thinks, meant the Iliad as an example of
the fatal consequences of discord among political allies.” In prac-
tice it has enhanced ** the false lustre of military achievements.”^
Whatever Homer meant, the efficient moral of a story is apt to differ
from that intended by the author. In fact, the logical objection is
as strong as the artistic. A novel can show at most what would
happen if the novelist were in the place of Providence. From
Caleb Williams it would be] difficult to draw any decided infer-
ence. Falkland, the refined hero, is supposed to be a victim to the
absurd superstitions of honour. This induces him, first, to murder
a ruffian who has grossly insulted him ; then to allow two innocent
men to be hanged for the crime ; and finally to carry out, for many
years, a relentless persecution of poor Caleb Williams, who has-
divined his secret. The most obvious moral is that you ought not
to have half a conscience. If Falkland had been thoroughly
virtuous, he would not have committed murder ; if thoroughly
vicious, ho would not have been tortured to death by remorse. But
fortunately this childish design of enforcing a political theory did
not spoil Godwin’s story. The situation is impressive, an^ in
spite of many clumsy details, is impressively represented. The
spectacle of a man of delicate sense of honour writhing imder the
dread of detection, and opposed by an incarnation of vulgar curiosity,
moves us to forget the superfluous moral.

A similar conception has been worked out in two well-known
modem novels, Paul FerroU, and Eugene Aram. Godwin
appears, from a paper described by Mr. Paul, to have thought
of treating the last subject himself ; and possibly suggested it
to the late Lord Lytton, who was one of his latest youthful
admirers. The contrast between Eugene Aram and Caleb
Williams is curious. The later novelist - has altogether the
advantage in the construction of the plot and the attention to
artistic proprieties. There is a correct love affiur interwoven
with thorough literary skill; the chief figures are dexterously
balanced ; there is a proper comic man in the background ; a senti-
mental conclusion to a secondary story to contrast with the tragic
conclusion of the main plot ; and except that Aram himself is an
intolerable stick, and discourses about the True and Beautiful, no
judicious critic could find fault with the design or execution.
Godwin has no such mechanical skill, and little of what we should

(l) lb., 133.

460

WlLUAil GODWIN.

call poetical imagination. His Gharacters do not live, and are not
dexterously picked out. A love story whicli is intruded is common-
place and rather coarse. A rambling account of a den of thieves
suggests recollections of Gril Bias. It is meant to be politically
instructive, and is tiresome and irrelevant ; and yet the story lays
hold of us. The main reason is obvious. The aufJior may not have
mastered the story, but the story has mastered him. He is possessed
and dominated by his characters. Though he is neither a Fielding
nor a Scott, he interests us as he would have interested us by
describing a real set of adventures of similar character. In the
hands of a more powerful writer, Falkland and his victim might
have been more alive ; but few writers could have communicated to
us more vividly the strong fascination by which Godwin watches the
creatures of his fancy. His straightforward sincerity and the genuine
interest of a moralist in the working out of an ethical problem are
at the bottom of Godwin’s success.

St. Leon is an inferior work. Here, too, indeed, there is
a striking situation, possibly suggested by Godwin’s speculations
on human immortality. A ruined noblo has retired to a
quiet retreat to enjoy domestic happiness. He hospitably
receives an old man, persecuted^ broken down, and anxious to
die, who slowly intimates that he is the possessor of the secret
of immortality and of the philosopher’s stone. St. Leon may
only have it on condition of revealing it to no one. It has
been a curse to its proprietor, who has learnt the folly of trying to
vary from tho kindly ways of man.” St. Leon’s temptation, his
unwillingness to possess a secret which will separate him from his
family gradually yielding to the desire of boundless wealth and life,
is strikingly set forth. Here Godwin has to deal with a problem
to his taste ; and he writes with a power reminding us of Caleb
Williams. Enough is done to suggest that the story might be
impressive in other hands. An immortal man is surely a theme for
a great artist. The Wandering Jew seems to be a legend as
appropriate for poetical treatment as Faust, though it has not
been fortunate enough to find a higher sponsor than Eugene Sue. %
Hawthorne, in his unfinished novel, seems to have been thinking of
a similar motive ; and we may wonder what he would have made
•of the strange psychological problems suggested by a man over-
whelmed by the too complete fruition of his desires, cut oS from
human sympathy by immunity from human sufi^ering, and at last
anxious only to resign the gift for which we should all at first sight
profess to be anxious. But Godwin makes the interest turn almost
exclusively upon the difficulty felt by St. Leon in accounting for his
mdden wealth. That is a^ difficulty which might surely have been
surmounted by a man of talent with a possible eternity in front of
him. The story becomes a rather commonplace romance, devoted

WILUASC GODWIN.

461

in great part to an attack upon the Inquisition^ and now barely
readable.

It is needless to speak of Godwin’s labours as an antiquarian and
a manufacturer of children’s books. It was not by such work that
he made a mark on the world. They were written to gain bread,
not influence. I£ he expected moro from the essays, long afterwards
published, upon the Christian religion, his calculations were mistaken.
He said nothing that can now bo startling, or that was novel even
at the time of writing. But his creed deserves a word of notice,
if only as greatly influencing and probably identical with the creed
of Shelley. Godwin was called an Atheist, and, in a sense, may
have deserved the name. We find his nephew, Charles Clairmont,
lamenting pathetically that the idea of God and a future state is so
deeply rooted ” in him that he fears that he will ''never be able to
get over it.”^ Conscientious perseverance may do much in such
matters. When, however, another disciple of Godwin boasts of
having made a convert to Atheism, Godwin rebukes him, and calls
his " zeal of proselytism ” in such a cause unnatural.^ Godwin
explains that he docs not believe in an " intellectual God, a God made
after the image of man,” but that he thinks a man wrong who is
without a sense of religion. From other passages it seems that Godwin
was in a state of mind common enough, though not so commonly
avowed. He distinctly disbelieves in the God of Christianity, and
regards him as not only a fiction, but an immoral fiction. He does
not " believe in God ” as those words would be understood by a
Deist, or even by a Pantheist. His belief, if it is to be called a
belief, is too vague to be fixed in a formula. It vanishes when
looked at directly. But he feels deeply the importance of those
vague emotions of awful reverence which are prompted by a calm
contemplation of the mysteries and infinities of the surrounding
universe, and is anxious to preserve without attempting to explain or
justify them. In later years he seems to have become more tolerant
to the established order, and less anxious to upset existing beliefs.
Tet the legacy of essays called by him Christianity Unveiled, after
the familiar title of Holbach’s essay, was meant as a destructive
attack upon the popular creed, and it is significant of the change of
feeling that a man so genuinely convinced of the supreme importance
of a candid utterance of all opinions, did not think it a duty to
fire the mine in his lifetime. Mr. Mill tells us in his Autobiography
that reticence upon such points was considered to be a duty in his
youth, and the bankrupt bookseller may be excused for not openly
expressing the scepticism which men of more independent position
desired to retain in a smouldering condition.

Leslie Stephen.

(2) Ib., ii. 268.

(1) Life, ii. 187.

MORMONISM FROM A MORMON TOINT OP VIEW.

Dttbiko a reoent visit to Salt Lake City I happened to ask one of the
leading Mormons what works, in addition to tho Book of Mormon,
would give me a fair idea of the religious doctrines professed by the
Latter-day Saints and of their history, as they themselves desire to
have it told. The gentleman addressed most kindly offered for
my acceptance several books, among which were Pamphlets by
Orson Pratt, one of the twelve Apostles of the Church, the Key to
the Science of Theology by Parley P. Pratt, and the Rise, Pro-
gress, and Travels of tho Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints by President George A. Smith.

So far as religious tenets are concerned, the authority of tho works
mentioned may doubtless be accepted as final. With regard to the
historical portion of the subject it is different, and here a certain
allowance must be made for the bias of a religious partisan ; but it is
not the less interesting to read this brief, but stirring history, as it
is told by those who played a prominent part in its events.
Having s^died these books, I shall endeavour to give a short
account of Mormonism, as it is described by the Mormons themselves,
and as it appears to myself, being personally little predisposed to
regard it favourably, but convinced that its case has seldom been
fairly stated to the public.

A certain practical importance attaches at present to the subject,
for the future position of Mormonism in the Union is among tho
many difficult political problems now offering themselves for solution
in the United States of America. It presents indeed, upon a small
scale, a similar difficulty to that caused by the existence of slavery
in the Southern States ; as to how far it is possible to maintain jpoli-
tioal federation between communities differing essentially in their
social institutions. The American Constitution is wonderfully
elastic, but it has proved impossible to retain slavoholding States
permanently within its limits. Is its elasticity sufficient to admit
into the Union a State which would legalise polygamy ? Hitherto
a negative answer has been given by Congress to this question, and
the claims of Utah Territory to become a State have been urged in
vain ; but the steady increase of population and wealth is constantly
strengthening those claims, and they cannot much longer be ignored.
The fourth" unsuccessful attempt to obtain admission as a State of
the Union was made in 1872, when the population of Utah already
exceeded that of Nevada and Nebraska combined (at the dato of
their admidsion), being upwards of 105,000; and a memorial to

MOBMONISM FBOH A HOBlfON POINT OP VIEW.

'463

Congress was adopted, praying for admission into the Union as a
Sovereign State. The constitution then proposed for the State,
which \^as to bear the na^e of Deseret, was approved by the people
of the Territory, with only 368 dissentient votes ; it provided for
women’s suffrage, and minority representation.

The admission of Nevada, Nebra^a, and Colorado, all of them
neighbouring territories with inferior population to Utah, appears
to justify the assertion of the Mormons that the unpopularity of
their religion was the sole cause of their exclusion. Had Deseret
been created a Sovereign State in 1872, the controversy as to
polygamy might have entered upon a new and critical phase, as the
State Legislature would doubtless have claimed the right to legalise
plurality of wives within its own jurisdiction. No such right can be
claimed by the existing legislature of Utah, whose powers are
restricted by the provisions of the Act of 1850, to which the Territory
owes its political existence. All laws of the Territorial legislature
must have the sanction of the Governor (who is appointed by the
President of the United States), and are passed subject to the
approval of Congress. The Judges of the Territorial Supreme Court
arc also appointed by the President, so that the control of the
Federal authorities is complete over all departments in the Territory,
and it is natural that the Mormon community should aspire to a
more independent position. It is questionable, however, whether
independence would not prove a disadvantage to the Mormons, as
tending to bring them into direct collision with popular feeling,
which has always been more or less hostile to them throughout the
Union, while the Federal authorities have acted a friendly part.
During seventeen sessions of the Utah Legislative Assembly, the
power of disapproval has only once been exercised by Congress, and
then (as might have been expected) in relation to the law of
marriage. The Washington Government has afforded protection to
the Mormons against local officers and judges, President Grant,
in particular, having recently braved considerable unpopularity
by removing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Utah for
arbitrary and illegal conduct ” in his dealings with the Latter-day
Saints. Again, a few years ago the United States officials in Utah
set at naught the Territorial law imder which jurors were selected
and summoned, rejecting those who professed their belief in Mormon
doctrines. Where the value at issue exceeds $1,000, an appeal Ues
to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a case tried by a
packed jur}% and given against the municipal officers of Salt Lake
City, was accordingly appealed. The unanimous decision of the
Supremo Court at Washington was, that the jury had not been
legally impanelled, and the judgment of the Utah court was reversed.
Chreat rejoicing was caused at ISMt Lake City by this decision in the

464

MOBMONISM FKOM A HOBMON POINT OF VIEW.

Engelbreclit case, as proving that the inhabitants of territories had
rights in common with their countrymen, and that there was justice
in the United States even for the professors of a very unpopular
religion.

It may appear strange that in the freest of lands, and in the latter
half of the nineteenth century, a legal doubt should have existed as
to whether civil disabilities were attached to any form of religious
opinion ; but it must be remembered that the evidence of an atheist
was very recently rejected in English courts of justice, and the Legis-
lature of ITorth Carolina expelled last year a member, because he
conscientiously declared his disbelief in the existence of a God. The
fact is that, even in Protestant countries, complete religious toleration
is limited to certain recognised persuasions, so that feeble and unpopu-
lar sects have still to unite in claiming for themselves the same liberty
of conscience which has been conceded to all numerous and powerful
dissenting bodies. Science now demands from theology absolute and
unconditional freedom, and the day can hardly bo far distant when
theological heterodoxy will cease to involve any civil penalties in a
free country. At present the Mormon refugees of the Rocky
Mountains demand only that amount of civil and religious liberty
which the Constitution professes to guarantee to every American
citizen, and which the Pilgrim Fathers found for themselves '' on the
wild New England shore.” They complain that their enemies
have told their story, that their own statements have been ignored,
and that no credit has been given to them for an honest attempt, in
these latter days, to put in practice the doctrines of the early Christian
Church. Even their enemies wdll hardly deny that they displayed
faith, courage, and endurance, when they resolved, after being
expelled from one settlement after another, to plunge into tho
unknown wilderness, and to found a new Zion beyond the existing
limits of the United States. These qualities have triumphed over
great physical difficulties, and a stranger is astonished at the pros-
perity which Mormon industry has produced. A carefully organised
system of irrigation has converted a barren desert into a productive
garden, and has had the remarkable effect of raising the permanent
level of the lake ten feet higher than it was in 1850. Every require-
ment of the religious community is abundantly supplied by contribu-
tions, assessed and collected upon voluntary principles. Besides the
immense new tabernacle, a temple is now in course of construction,
almost Egyptian in its massive grandeur, towards which aU the faith-
ful contribute, those who cannot afford money giving their labour.
The Indians in Utah have been conciliated by the humane policy of
fe^ng, clothing, and teaching, instead of fighting them. The old
accusations of violence and cruelty towards Gentile emigrants, or
Mormon deserteihs, if not altogether disproved, have at least been

HOBMONISM PBOM A MOBMON POIBI OF VIEW.

46$

lived down in recent times^ and the existence of a military comp near
Salt Lake Oity is now^ probably, more unnecessary than it woidd be
at any other town west of the Bocky Mountains. In order to appre-
ciate the tranquillity, sobriety, and steady industry of Deseret (as
the Mormons prefer to name their country), it may be contrasted
with Nevada, an adjoining State almost identical with Deseret as to
soil, climate, and mineral products. The so-callcd Silver State
stands now pre-eminent in the Union for its turbulent manners, for
tho number of its liquor-shops, and as being the only State which
legalises public gambling. Of course Nevada is merely passing
through a certain rude stage of her existence, just as California has
done before her, and she, too, will one day set her house in order ;
the remarkable point is that Utah should, alone among the young
communities of the far west, have altogether escaped such a condition
of things. To many persons this will appear to be sufficiently
explained by the fact that the Mormons both preach and practise
habits of extreme temperance, almost amounting to total abstinence
from every sort of stimulant.

Considerable hostility undoubtedly exists between the Mormons
and some of their Gentile fellow-residents ; this is greatly due to
the bitter attacks of certain local newspapers upon the Latter-day
Saints, and upon those who show them any favour. When I was in
Salt Lake City the Governor of Utah Territory was very severely
assailed for his alleged partiality towards the Mormons, and a grim
hope was at the same time expressed that Mr. Brigham Young
might shortly take the place merited by him at the only fireside,
which we know of, large enough to accommodate him and the whole
of his family.” That such expressions are publicly used in speaking
of a man whom the great bulk of the community regard as an
inspired prophet, is a sufficient proof that no terrorism is now exer-
cised against dissenters from the dominant church of Utah. To a
stranger like myself, desirous of understanding as far as possible the
tenets of their faith, a frank and friendly reception was accorded by
such of the Mormon leaders as I had an opportunity of visiting.
Every explanation asked for was at once afforded, but I do not fed
justified in mentioning names, or in repeating any private conversa-
tion, although it was probably not intended to be confidential. A
passing stranger can only sec the external sur&ce of society, and in
this respect there is nothing very remarkable in Salt Lake City. The
parlour of a flourishing Mormon householder does not differ much
in appearance from that of an Englishman, who happens to have a
numerous family, with a large proportion of sisters or daughters.
A new and somewhat startling sensation is, however, experienced
during the ceremony of introduction on first hearing the words :
** Now, Sir, let me introduce you to another of my wives.” The

m

HOBMONISH FROM A HOBMON POINT OP TEW.

strangenesB of these words mainly consists in the very fact that they
are uttered, not by a dark-skinned barbarian, but by a gentleman
answering to the description of the English soldiers given by Le Con-
sent de 1813 : “ blancs, bicn ras^ s, comme de bons bourgeois,” — and
in a room with all the familiar surroundings of civilised domestic life.
The public worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterrday
Saints, as the Mormons invariably designate their own sect, is con-
ducted with great simplicity, very much as it is in an English
dissenting chapel, and the preponderance of ladies is by no means
greater than that to which we are accustomed in places of worship
generally. The only marked peculiarity is the administration of the
Lord’s Supper in water instead of wine, and of this sacrament it
appears to be customary for all the faithful present to partake, old
and young alike. The hymns are sung by a mixed choir of young
men and women, and addresses are delivered by eminent Mormon
elders. When I was present the speakers were Mr. Daniel II. Wells,
mayor of Salt Lake City, and Mr. Cannon, brother of the delegate
from Utah Territory to Congress. All religious argument was based
upon the authority of the Bible, to which the Mormon revelations
claim to be additional^ but in no sense contmry. Various Mormon
doctrines were touched upon, and special allusions were made to the
persecutions undergone by the Saints in past times, and to those
which appeared to menace them in the future. Although not yet
half a century old, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
has passed through a baptism of fire, and living men can speak with
mingled pride and sorrow of personal friends who died as martyrs
to their religious faith. Thirty years ago Nauvoo in Illinois was a
Mormon settlement, almost equal in population and prosperity to
Salt Lake City at the present day ; those who witnessed its total
destruction can hardly be considered idle alarmists, when they allude
to the possibility of trials yet to come. The tone of the speakers
was thoroughly practical, exhorting to industry and sobriel^, to
abstention from all stimulants, including tobacco, coffee, and tea,
and to the cultivation of all the useful arts, “ even those of war,
if necessary to the safety of our community.” These exhortations
were mainly addressed to the juniors present, a saving clause being
inserted for those seniors who had borne the burden and heat of the
evil days, and who, having now established this mountain refuge for
the Saints, might require to “solace decaying nature” with an
occasional narcotic. The addresses breathed a tolerant and rational
spirit, the doctrines inculcated were simply those of a charitable form
of Christianity, and there was no mention of that peculiar domestic
institution which sums up in the minds of so many all notions con-
nected with Mormonism.

After all it is upon “ plural marriages” that the interest as well

HOBMOXISK FBOM A HOBMOK FOIBT OF VIEW. 467

as the hostility of the outer world has always been concentrated ; a
Mormon is simply regarded as a man with a number of wives, and
beyond this most people know little, and care less, as to the doctrines
or customs of the Latter-day Saints. Were it not for their polygamy,
it seems probable that the Mormons might now enjoy the same
perfect toleration which is extended in America to other forms of
religious eccentricity, and that Deseret would long ere this have
taken her place among the States of the Union. On the other hand,
it must be borne in mind that polygamy is a comparatively recent
innovation, condemned by the Book of Mormon in the strongest
possible terms : —

** The word of God burthens me because of your grosser crimes. For behold,
thus saith the Lord, this people (the Nephites) begin to wax in iniquity ; they
understand not the scriptures ; for they seek to oxcuse themselves because of
the things which were written concerning David and Solomon his son. Behold,
David and Solomon tnily had many wives and concubines, which thing was
abominable before me, saith the Lord ; wherefore, thus saith the Lord, I have
led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by the power of mine arm,
that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of
Joseph. Wherefore I, the Lord God, will not suffer that this people shall do
like unto them of old. Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the
word of the Lord ; for there shall not any man among you have save it be one
wife, and concubines ho shall have none ; for I, the Lord God, delighteth (sic)
in the chastity of women.”

These are the words of ‘‘ Jacob, the brother of Nephi,” and words
could hardly be more distinct or emphatic; but theologians can
generally manage to explain away inconvenient texts and hard
sayings, while in this case it may be held by the Saints that the
above injunctions were repealed by the subsequent Revelation on
Celestial Marriage. This tardy revelation, vouchsafed to Joseph
Smith shortly before the close of his career, is the sole warrant for
plurality of wives — a practice which is general among the Mormon
leaders, but not throughout the community at large. With them,
as with Mahometans or Hindoos, polygamy is doubtless very much
a question of expense, and I was informed on good authority that
probably about one in four of the Saints is the husband of more than
one wife. The majority, therefore, adheres in practice to the

Doctrine and Covenants,” which book is a recognised authority
upon articles of Mormon faith, and declares that one man should
have one vrife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of
death, when cither is at liberty to marry again.” The number of
wives ascribed to eminent individuals is usually exaggerated, sixteen
being the largest number admittedly married to one man, and six
constituting the household of a wealthy and influential elder.

The Mormons compare themselves to the Jews, as well as to the
early Christians ; they have been a persecuted people, driven forth
to wander through trackless deserts, and are now living apart from

468 MOBicomsic fboh a mobuon foutt or view.

their neighbours in a theocratic commonwealth of their own. Their
preoedents on behalf of polygamy are mainly drawn from the Hebrew
Scriptures ; but they also assert that they have in their favour the
eAmple of the primitive Christian Church. Without going into
their arguments, it may be at once conceded that polygamy was
sanctioned by the ancient Hebrew law ; but it is not the less out of
date in the new world of America, and is a standing peril to the
Church of Latter-day Saints. By an act of the Utah Legisla-
ture the right of suffrage has been conferred on ^'all American
women, native or naturalised,” and it hardly seems possible that
polygamy can long survive such legislation. At present the exten-
sion of the franchise among persons, few of whom are native ”
Americans, and many of whom are very imperfectly educated,
probably strengthens the hands of the Mormon leaders by swamping
entirely the Gentile element. But such an effect is not likely to
be permanent, for the rising generation will bo educated ; in 1871,
just after the passing of the act above referred to, sixty per cent,
of the girls between four and sixteen years of age were enrolled as
scholars throughout Utah Territory, being slightly in excess of the
percentage among boys of the same age. Equality between the
sexes in education and in electoral privileges must tend to bring
about social and religious equality also, and the example of their
independent sisters in Wyoming Territory, where women enjoy
complete civil rights, will not be thrown away upon the ladies of
Salt Lake City. The tone of public feeling throughout the neigh-
bouring states and territories is more favourable towards “ woman^s
rights ” than it is in any other part of the world ; and even if this
be partly due to a reaction produced by Mormonism, it cannot fail
in time to influence the female electors of Utah. Thus it is possible
that a peaceable solution of the difficulty may be found, and
polygamy may be abolished, not by external force, but by consti-
tutional action within the Mormon community itself. ^

Meanwhile, this church of the nineteenth century possesses
amazing vitality, and seems to carry us back to a bygone era of
belief, exhibiting as it docs the phenomenon of a religious sect
heartily convinced of its future mission and claiming the present for
its own. While other churches look to the past for all that is best
and truest in religion, the Latter-day Saints regard the present also
as a period of miracle and revelation, ^ey expect, in the imme-
diate future, the conversion of all who inhabit their vast continent
with as serene a confidence as that with which the early Christians
seem to have anticipated the evangelisation of the Homan Empire.
It may be said of them that in theology they maintain the modem
doctrine of continuity, rather than ancient theories of convulrion
and catastrophe. Accepting, in a literal sense, the Jewish and

Momsomm FBOK A MOBMOy POINT OF VIEW: 469

Christian Scriptures, they apparently entertain no fear lest scientific
research should undermine their faith, as they look for a continuous
course of revelation, which shall harmonise theology with the
general advance in human knowledge.

The title of Parley P. Pratt’s recent work, Key to the Science
of Theology, 1874, may seem almost to involve a contradiction in
terms; but it indicates the desire of a distinguished. Mormon theo-
logian to keep abreast, if possible, of the scientific spirit of the age.
Whether the attempt to do this may have proved successful or not, his
policy is surely wiser than that which has frequently placed science
and theology in opposition so direct, that every conquest of know-
ledge over ignorance has appeared to be also a victory over religion.
Indeed, Mr. Parley Pratt is entitled to a welcome from the lovers of
free thought, considering how rarely theologians seek to identify
the progress of their own tenets with that of humanity in every
department of science and art, and how seldom it is that they do not

“ Grow palo

Lest their own judgments should bocomo too bright,

And their free thoughts bo crimes, and earth have too much light.”

To quote his own words : —

‘*The creeds of the Fathers soom to have been cast in the mould of other
ages, to bo adapted to a more narrow sphere of intellectual development, and to
be composed of material too much resembling cast-iron ; or, at least not suffi-
ciently elastic to expand with the expansion of mind, to grow with the growth,
and advance with the progressive principles of the age. For these reasons,
perhaps more than any other, the master spirits of the age are breaking loose
from the old moorings, and withdrawing from established and venerated
systems.”

Holding these views, Mr. Parley Pratt has aimed at embodying, in
his introductory key, a general view of what he calls the Science of
Theology, ‘‘in a concise and somewhat original manner and style, as
gathered from revelation, history, prophecy, reason, and analogy.”
The revelation and prophecy referred to and founded upon are:
partly those accepted by all orthodox Christians, partly those of
recent date (such as the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and
Covenants) peculiar to the followers of Joseph Smith. It is hard
to reconcile polygamy with “ the progressive principles of the age,”
and with modern ideas as to the social position and dignity of woman ;
but Mr. Parley Pratt is not without a scientific plea on behalf of his
theological dogma. He maintains that —

“ The principal object contemplated by this law is the multiplication of the
children of good and worthy fathers, who will teach them the truth, and this is
far preferable to sending them into the world in the lineage of an unworthy or
ignorant parentage.*’ — “ A wise legislation, or the law of God, would punish
with just severity the crimes of adultery or fornication, and would not suffer
the idiot, , the confirmed, irreclaimable drunkard, the man of hereditary disease.

4T0 xoBicoinsM mtm a hobhok point op tiew.

or of vidoiis habits, to possess or retain a wift ; while at the same time it would
proTide for a good and capable man to honorably receiTO and entertain more
^yes than one.” — ‘*The restoration of pure laws andpraotices has already
commenced to improye or regenerate a race. A holy and temperate life ; pur&
morels and manners ; faith, hope, charity ; cheerfulnesB, gentleness, integrity ;
intellectual deyelopment, pure truth, and knowledge will produce a race more
beautiful in form and features, stronger and more yigorous in constitution,,
happier in temperament and disposition, more intellectual, less yicious, and
better prepared for long life and good days in their mortal sojourn. Each
generation goyexned by the same laws will still improye.”

This sounds plausible enough in theory^ and perhaps the result of
polygamy as practised in Utah is, that a large proportion of offspring
is bom to the most energetic, intelligent, and industrious citizens.
In an age when there is reason to fear an increasing tendency to

non-survival of the fittest,” such a result may be admitted as tend-
ing to counterbalance some of the disadvantages attending plurality
of wives.

The highest types of domestic animals have been developed under
a system of breeding and selection, very similar to that which is
advocated in the above quotations, and the burden of proof seems to
rest upon those who maintain that a high type of humanity cannot
be developed after a similar fashion. Should the Morftions succeed
in carrying out practically, for a few generations, any such ideas as
are above alleged to be the main objects contemplated in their law
of polygamy, they would have fair grounds for the belief that they
are destined to inherit the whole earth.

A race of human beings developed (if such a thing were feasible)
by strictly scientific selection and culture could not fail to gain the
upper hand in the general struggle for dominion, but it remains to
be seen whether any success in this direction will attend the system
of the Mormons.

“ Our physical organisation, health, vigour, strength of body, intellectual
faculties, inclinations, &c., are influenced very much by parentage. Hereditary
disease, idiocy, weakness of mind, or of constitution, deformity, tendency to
violent and ungovernable passions, yicious appetites and desires, are engendered
by parents ; and are bequeathed as a heritage from generation to generation.”

These are the words of a leading apologist of polygamy, who founds
an argument in his own favour upon this truth, now generally
admitted, but almost as generally ignored. It is impossible here to
discuss so wide and so difficult a question, and I must limit myself
to these few brief quotations from the Key to the Science of Ideo-
logy, leaving the r^er to judge of their worth.

The series of pamphlets by Orson Pratt contains discussions on a
great variety of questions connected with Mormonism. In particular
the Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon ” is considered at
gfmt IfiOQgtbj as well as question : ''Was Joseph Smith sent of

MOBUCONISH PBOM A HOBMON FOIKT OF YIEW. 471

Mr. Orson' Pratt endeavours to show, in the first place, that to
expect more revelation is not umcriptural ; secondly, that it is not
unreasonable; and thirdly, that it is indispensably necessary. He then
goes on to compare the evidences of the Book of Mormon and of the
Bible, alleging that both alike have been confirmed by miracles, and
that the prophecies of the Bible, especially those of Isaiah, have been
fulfilled in the Book of Mormon and in the history of Mormonism.
Throughout his elaborate arguments he assumes the genuineness and
authenticity of the Bible, an assumption which he is of course entitled
to make in arguing with orthodox Christians. His position is : The
truth of the Bible rests upon sufficient evidence, and this evidence is
in every way weaker than that which can be adduced for the Book
of Mormon — ^therefore, d fortiori^ the Book of Mormon is true.
Whatever may be the flaw in this syllogism, those whom Archdeacon
Palcy satisfies cannot fail to have some trouble in disposing of Mr.
Orson Pratt. Towards other Christian sects, whose creeds are an
abomination unto the Lord,’^ the Mormon apostle displays but little
brotherly fecUng. Upon Papist and Protestant alike ho pours out
the vial of his wrath and contempt in language almost too forcible
for quotation, Jbut he seeks to base every reproach directed against
them upon texts from the orthodox Scriptures. The pamphlet,
entitled : The Bible and tradition, without further revelation, an
insufficient guide,’’ is, in fact, a powerful onslaught upon modern
Christendom, perhaps as damaging as any that a professed unbeliever
could have made, although in this case the assailant accepts with
reverence the Christian Scriptures, seeking to found thereon a revela-
tion newer and more complete.

It is somewhat disappointing, if the Book of Mormon is to be
accepted as the new revelation, to find it so very inferior, alike in
matter and in style, to its great predecessors. Nearjy equal in bulk
to the Old Testament, it lacks altogether the poetic grandeur and the
graphic force of the Hebrew Scriptures, although the biblical phrase-
ology has been laboriously imitated throughout. It is styled : ‘'An
Account written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates taken from
the Plates of Nephi. Translated by Joseph Smith, Jun.”

‘‘Whorofore it is an abridgment of tho record of the people of Nephi, and
also of the Lamanitos ; written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the
House of Israel ; and also to Jew and Gentile: written by way of command-
ment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation. Written and sealed
up, and hid up unto tho Lord, that they might not be destroyed ; to come forth
by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof : sealed by tho
hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by the
hand of Gentile ; the interpretation thereof by the gift of God.”

<< An abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also ; which is a record of
the people of Jared ; who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded tho
language of tho people when they were bmlding a tower to get to Heaven ;
which is to i^ow unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the
Lord hath done, for their others; and that they may know the covenants of the

472 IfOBHOmSM FROK A. HOSUOK POINT OP TDSW.

ZiOid( tliat they ace not oast off for oTor ; and also to the oonyinoing of the Jew
and Gentile, that jesus is the ohbist, the eternal god, znanifestmg himself
unto all nations. And now if there are faults, they are the mistakes of men ;
wherefore condemn not the things of Qod, that ye may be found spotless at the
judgment seat of Christ.”

The sacred volume is divided into thirteen books, bearing the
names of various prophets, one of whom is Mormon. The last book
is that of Moroni, who says : —

“ Behold I, Moroni, do finish the record of my Father, Mormon. Behold, I
have but few things to write, which things I have been commanded by my
Father. And now it came to pass that after the great and tremendous battle
at Cumorah, behold, the Nophites who had escaped into the country southward,
were hunted by the Lamanitos, until they were all destroyed; and my father
also was killed by them, and I, oven remain alone to write the sad tale of the
destruction of my people. But behold, they are gone, and I fulfil the com-
mandment of my father. And whether they will slay mo, I know not ; there-
fore I will write and hide up the records in the earth, and whither I go it
mattereth not. Behold my Father hath made this record, and he hath written
the intent thereof. And behold, I would write it also, if I had room upon the
plates ; but I have not ; and ore I have none, for I am alone ; my father hath
been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolks, and I have not friends, nor whither
to go ; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live, I know not. Behold,
four hundred years have passed away since the coming of our Lord and
Saviour.”

“ And now behold, wo have written this record according to our knowledge
in the characters, which are called among us the reformed Fgyptian, being
handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if
our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew ; but
the Hebrew hath been altered by us also ; and if we could have written in
Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record. But the
Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also tJiat none other
people knoweth our language, therefore ho hath prepared means for the inter-
pretation thereof. And these things are written, that wo may rid our gaiments
of the blood of our brethren who have dwindled in unbelief. And behold,
these things which we have desired concerning our brethren, yea, oven their
restoration to the knowledge of Christ, is according to tho prayers of all the
saints who have dwelt in tho land. And may the Lord J osus Christ grant that
their prayers may bo answered according to their faith ; and may God tho
Father remember the covenant which he hath made with the houBe4>f Israel ;
and may he bless them for ever, through faith on the name of Jesus Christ.
Amen.”

The record in question professes lo contain a history of the
American continent from the date of its first colonisation by Jared
and his brother at the time of the dispersion from Babel down to
the year a.d. 420, when Moroni, the last of the Nephite prophets,
buried his plates in the hill of Cumorah. This account of pro-historic
America is but a tedious composition, full of battles and slaughter,
full of proper names, of reiterations, and of unnecessary phrases.
We are told how the Jaredites, emigrants from the valley of Nimrod,
who " did carry with them Deseret, which by interpretation is a
honey-bee,** attained to great civilisation and prosperity in North
America, and were utterly destroyed by internecine warfare about
the year 600 b.c. They were succeeded by a “ remnant of the house

MOBMONISM FEOH A KOEMOK POINT OP VIEW. 473^

of Joseph/’ brought from Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah to
inherit tho land. These appear to have crossed the Pacific Ocean,
landing on the west coast of South America, whence they eventually
overspread that continent. They separated before long into two
distinct nations, known as NepMtes and Lamanites, the former
migrating from the persecutions of the latter, and sailing forth
into the west sea by the narrow neck which led into the land north-
ward.” Through tho personal ministry of Jesus Christ, who visited
them shortly after his ascension, the It^ephites were converted from
the Mosaic to the Christian faith, which was in time accepted by the
Lamanites also ; and for two hundred years they prospered and
multiplied, and there was no contention in the land, all things being
common among them. This golden age was succeeded by a period
of apostasy ; and from that time forth they did have their goods
and their substance no more common among them, and they began
to be divided into classes, and they began to build up churches unto
themselves, to get gain, and began to deny tho true church of
Christ.” A terrible war broke out between the Nephites, now
settled in Iforth America (known as tho land Desolation), and the
Lamanites, who invaded them from the land Bountiful, lying south-
ward of the Isthmus of Darien. This war ended in the annihilation
of the Nephites, an exceeding fair and delightsome people,” while
a degraded remnant of the Lamanites still survive, after fifteen
centuries of rapine and discord,' under the name of American
Indians. Now the heads of the Lamanites were shorn ; and they
were naked, save it were skin, which was girded about their loins ;
and the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark
which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them
because of their transgression.” Thus the term Gentile is properly
used to denote the w/iite man, as distinguished from the copper-
coloured house of Israel, and the Mormons themselves are expressly
described as the “ Gentile Saints.” For the remnant of Joseph a
glorious future is prophesied. They, the despised redskins, shall
have the land for their inheritance, and it shall be a land of ^liberty
unto the Gentiles, and there shall be no kings upon the land.” They
are to be the chief agents in building the New Jerusalem, and will
be converted and redeemed before their brethren of Judah.

The story of the plates, from which the sacred book is said to
have been translated, first into English, and subsequently into nearly
aU the European languages, is of some interest from an archaeo-
logical point of view, and may be told in a few words. They are
described as having been foimd by Joseph Smith in a cyst composed
of six stones, smooth on the inner surfaces, and firmly cemented
together. This stone box was buried in the side of a hill near
Palmyra, in the state of New York. The plates had the appearance
of gold, were six by eight inches in width and length, each plate

VOLi XX. N.S. K K

474 HOBKONISH FBOH A MOBMON POINT OF TIEW.

being nearly as thick as common tin. They were filled on both
sides with small characters beautifully engraved, and were fastened
at one edge with three rings running through the whole: thus
bound together they formed a volume about six inches in thickness,
a part of which was sealed. Yarious unsuccessful attempts were
made by the enemies of Joseph Smith to obtain possession of these
plates, and they finally disappeared, having been examined and
described by eleven persons, whose testimony, signed with their
names, is added to the Book of Mormon.

The evidence of these persons would have been more conclusive
had not all of them been believers in the new prophet ; moreover the
diappearance of the plates is not quite satisfactorily explained by the
statement that they were restored to the charge of the angel under
whose guidance they were discovered. Still the actual existence, as
well as the genuine antiquity, of plates such as Joseph Smith is said
to have brought to light in 1827, seems to have been sufficiently
verified elsewhere.

In 1843, near Kinderhook, Illinois, in excavating a large mound
six brass plates were discovered, of a bell shape, four inches in
length, and covered with ancient characters. They were fastened
together with two iron wires, almost entirely corroded, and were
found, along with charcoal, ashes, and human bones, more than
twelve feet below the surface of a mound of the sugar-loaf form
^common in the Mississippi Valley. Largo trees growing upon these
artificial mounds attest their great antiquity, and doubtless they
contain much that vdll reward future investigation. Ifo key has
yet been discovered for the interpretation of the engravings upon
these brass plates, or of the strange glyphs upon the ruins of
Otolum in Mexico ; but when an amount of talent, learning, and
labour, equal to that bestowed upon Egyptian hieroglyphics or
Assyrian cuneiform characters, has been devoted to American
antiquities, wc may hope to learn something of those mysterious
races whose history the Book of Mormon professes to tell.

But if we admit that the plates themselves may have been genuine,
our faith in the founder of Mormonism, as a sincere religious enthu-
siast, is staggered by his mode of interpreting their contents. Ho
tells us that he found along with the records an instrument, called
by him the Urim and Thummim, and described as consisting of

two transparent stones set in the rim of a bow.” Through the
medium of this instrument, he says that he translated the unsealed
portion of these scanty records, the result being a bulky volume in
English, but he does not explain whether he used it as a magnifier,
nor how it proved to bo a Bosetta stone for his hieroglyphics, merely
asserting that it was by the gift and power of God.” That Joseph
Smith believed in his own mission his character and career alike
appear to indicate, and the many ecstatic visions which he describes

KORMOKISIC FROM A MORMON POINT OF YIEW. 475

•were probably real enough to him, but the compilation of the Book
of Mormon was an act involTing much time and labour, and cannot be
;accounted for by ecstasy.

In these days of La Salette and Faray le Monial it is, perhaps, too
much to say that a miracle, in order to find acceptance among edu-
oated persons, must be relegated to a remote age and country, and
must be invested with a certain amount of external dignity. It is,
however, a severe test of faith to be called upon to accept miracles
nnd revelations from a prophet well known to men yet living as “Joe
Smith,” and referred to as “ Mr. S.” in the writings of so eminent a
disciple as Mr. Orson Pratt. A most rcmakablc man Mr. S. un-
doubtedly was, capable of inspiring alike inestinguibil odio, ed
indomato amor. The bitter hostility of his opponents was more
than equalled by the devoted zeal of his converts, and although
murdered by mob violence at the early age of thirty-eight, he had
already so well accomplished his work, that the new creed, instead of
dying Avith him, continued to spread with increasing rapidity, and
was preached by his apostles and elders in every quarter of the globe.
He was a New Englander, bom a.d. 1805 in the State of Vermont,
iind began to have visions when he was about fourteen years of age.
In 1830 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was first
organised at Fayette in the State of New York, and its head-
quarters wore moved gradually westward, until a considerable settle-
ment was formed in Jackson County, Missouri. Here it was expected
that the New Jerusalem would be Wit, but an organised system of
persecution drove tho Saints out of the State of Missouri, and in
1839 they took refuge in Illinois, where they built the city of
Nauvoo in Hancock County, on the banks of the Mississippi, and
enjoyed a short respite from persecution. But in 1844 popular
hostility broke out with increased violence, and Joseph Smith (who
had been frequently brought before judicial tribunals, and invariably
acquitted) proceeded Avith liis brother Hyrum to Carthage, where
they surrendered themselves prisoners on a charge of treason, the
Governor of Illinois having promised them protection and a fair
trial. On the 27th of June, 1844, a large body of men, with their
faces blackened, surrounded the prison, and murdered the two
brothers Smith. Several of these men were indicted for murder,
and were tried about a year later, but they were acquitted. The
persecution of the Mormons did not slacken after the death of
their prophet, and in September, 1845, an armed mob commenced
burning houses in Hancock County, Avhile the authorities declared
that the State was unable to protect the Mormons, and they
must therefore go. Preparations were made by Brigham Young,
President of the Twelve Apostles, and the other leaders of the church
to explore the Bocky Mountains in accordance Avith an expressed
intention of the deceased prophet, and in February, 1846, the exodus

K K 2

476 HOBIIONISIC TBOM A HOBMON POINT OF VIEW.

.of the Mormons commenced. It was not, however, rapid enough to
satisfy their enemies, and in September the city of Nauvoo was bumi
by an armed mob, after several days’ siege, and the remnant of the
Mormons was driven across the Mississippi into Iowa. In the spring
of 1847 Brigham Young, with a party of pioneers, started from his
winter quarters on the Missouri in search of a place of settlement.
On the 24th of July he reached the Great Salt Lake Valley, after a
laborious march of more than one thousand miles through an un-
explored country. After erecting a fort, and hoisting the stars and
stripes upon what was then Mexican territory. President Young
hastened back to the banks of the Missouri, and in the fall of 1848
he arrived once more in Salt Lake Valley with eight hundred
waggons, and the main body of the Ijilormons. The severest hard-
ships were undergone by these people, not only during their march,
but during the first two years after settling in this barren valley,
four thousand three hundred feet above the sea, but strict dis-
cipline was enforced in the camp, and a careful system of rationing
was maintained, imtil an abundant harvest at last put an end to the
necessity. In 1850 the Territorial Government of Utah was organised
by Act of Congress, and Brigham Young was appointed Governor by
the President of the United States. From that time forward the
new colony has continued to prosper and progress with almost un-
exampled rapidity, in spite of great disadvantages as to soil, climate,
and situation.

There are few countries on the face of the globe, where the Latter-
day Saints have not attempted to preach their gospel, but as a rule
their preaching has not been tolerated. The records of their mission-
ary efforts make it obvious enough why they obtain so large a
proportion of their converts from Great Britain and Denmark, while
so few come from the Boman Catholic countries of Europe ; except in
Scandinavia and the British Empire, the foreign missions of the
Mormons have failed through the opposition of the powers Ahat be,
who have not only prohibited the missionaries from preaching, but in
many cases have expelled them from the country. Even in Norway,
so bitterly hostile were the ecclesiastics as to decide that the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a Christian sect, in order
to deprive it of the protection guaranteed by Norwegian law to alh
Christian dissenters. Three paragraphs from the Mormon creed, as
stated by Joseph Smith himself, will show tho injustice of such a
decision : —

** We believe in God, tbe Eternal Father, and in His Bon, Jesus Christ, and
in the Holy Ghost. Wo believe that through the atonement of Christ all
mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.
We believe that these ordinances are : First, Faith in the Lord Jesus Chi^;
second, Bepentanoe ; third. Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins ;
fourth, Laying on of hands for the Gift of the Holy Ghost.’’

310BM0NI6M FBOM A MOBMON POINT OF YIEW.

477

It is supposed that a larger percentage of the Danes than of any
other nation has hitherto embraced Mormonism, and a Danish news-
paper is regularly published at Salt Lake City. Since the separation
of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, the recruiting-ground of the
Mormons has been reduced, as their preaching has been rigidly
suppressed in those duchies. Of late years the immigration into
Utah from the European missions has varied from one to four
thousand persons annually. The most active attempts at propa-
gandism appear to have been made about the years 1852 — 53, but
in this country a Mormon mission was founded as early as 1837,
six years before the Hevelation on Celestial Marriage had given its
peculiar character to Mormonism.

It was not until 1843, thirteen years subsequent to the publication
of the Book of Mormon, and to the first organisation of the Church
of Latter-day Saints, that Joseph Smith proclaimed this new and
startling revelation. The style of the document resembles that of
the Book of Mormon, but it reveals *'a new and an everlasting
covenant,” distinctly at variance with the teachings of that book
already quoted, and justifies the patriarchs, and David and Solomon,
*'as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives.”
It is addressed to ‘‘my servant Joseph,” and confers upon him “the
keys and powx'r of the priesthood : — ^And verily, verily I. say unto
you, that whatsoever you seal on earth, shall be sealed in heaven.”
Upon “ mine handmaid, Emma Smith, your wife,” on the other hand,
obedience and submission are inculcated in the strongest terms. She
is required to “ receive all those that have been given unto my servant
Joseph — And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and
cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not
abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord.”
The revelation contains twenty-five short paragraphs only ; it is
somewhat apologetic in general tone, and is full of scriptural quota-
tions and precedents. A considerate stipulation is made for the
consent of the first bride, when another is to be espoused : “ As
pertaining to the law of the priesthood : — If any man espouse a
virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent ;
and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed
to no other man, then is he justified.” A marriage contracted under
the new covenant, and sealed by the appointed authority is valid to
all eternity, whereas in the case of ordinary married persons death
terminates the contract, and for them in heaven there will be neither
marrying nor giving in marriage.

Such are the terms of Joseph Smith’s revelation of Celestial
Marriage, which reminds one of the convenient doctrines from time
to time revealed to Mahomet upon analogous subjects. One moro
revelation and prophecy remains to be noticed ; it is said to have
appeared in the “ Pearl of Great Price,” published at Liverpool in

478 IfOEMOiriSM PROJtf A MOBMON POINT OP VIEW.

1861, and to have been given by the prophet, seer and revelatory
Joseph Smith,’’ on Christmas-day, 1832. The date of publication ia
the point requiring verification, and a genuine copy of the pamphlet
above-named would be invaluable, as the language of the alleged
prophecy has no prophetic ambiguity, and the fulfilment has been
complete. In a few terse words are described the rebellion of
South Carolina, and the consequent civil war, the appeal of the
Southern States to Great Britain for aid, the arming of tho slaves-
against their masters, and the outbreak of hostilities with the
Indians. If there is any accuracy in the dates as stated, Joseph
Smith must have been a man of rare poUtical sagacity and foresight.

At the present day most of our religious creeds and systems re-
semble tho great ecclesiastical edifices of the middle ages ; relics of
days, when faith was stronger and zeal was wanner. These magnifi-
cent relics may indeed be renovated by modem hands, and upon a
humble scale they can be reproduced, but the power of originating
such buildings has passed away, and ecclesiastical architecture is no
longer a living art. So is it with the chief accepted systems of
reUgion ; they have come down to us in their existing form from
periods with which we have nothing else in common, they are not
in harmony with the tone of modem life and thought, and could not
have been established in modem times. Nevertheless they stand
firmly on their ancient foundations, and will long continue to stand,
more or less altered and repaired in accordance with modem exi-

But the Mormon church is an exception ; it has been founded in
these latter days, and may be said to have introduced a new order of
ecclesiastical architecture, although ancient materials have been
largely employed. Hence the doctrines and history of this Church
appear to deserve careful study, for it presents tons a living example
of what its mightier predecessors must havo been in their early
career. The extinct dinomis may be studied in the existing apteryx,
and thus (borrowing a fresh metaphor) among the fossils of the past
we seem to find one recent specimen, still full of organic life, illus-
trating the laws of growth, the habits, and the constitution of those
species whose dry bones alone remain to us now. The living apteryx
seems to bo doomed ere long to become like its fossil congeners ; if
• 80, the time for study and observation is short.

Even those who have least sympathy with the peculiar doctrinea
of the Mormons may be willing to enter a protest in their favour,
whjen the issue really lies between religious liberty and persecution.
They are the only Christian sect that has suffered in our own daya
severe persecution at the hands of professing Christians, and their
cause on that account demands especial sympathy from all who
advocate absolute religious toleration. David Wedderbuiin.

MODERN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE.

The past history of Architecture — ^under which term is here included
all building in which any degree of aesthetic expression, over and
above the mere materialism of construction, is aimed at — ^brings,
before us a long perspective of structures, nearly all of which have
arisen imder tho influence either of despotism or of superstition.
Mr. Buckle pointed out the social and political bearing of the story
told by the oldest architectural monuments in existence. No wealth,
no extravagance could havo rendered possible the construction of
buildings so vast and useless as the pyramids, save under tho
supposition of an unlimited power of compelling labour without
remuneration : they arc the silent witnesses of a tjrranny more
portentous than any under which men have since placed their
necks. Equally do tho temples of Egj^^pt, with their forests of
granite columns and avenues of sphinxes, which must have been
the work of generations, speak of the predominating power of a
priesthood overshadowing the length and breadth of the land. In
Greece, though we are no longer under the shadow of despotism,
architecture is still the handmaid of superstition, and the temple is
the only building of importance in the history of the art. In
Imperial Rome the art was the costly plaything of sensual autocrats,
though with that occasional pretence of public spirit often displayed
under such circumstances ; and the great Baths built by some of the
emperors form perhaps the only examples of grand buildings
dedicated to the advantage of the community at large. Tho Indian
peninsula is strewn with temples erected in honour of the grotesque
or obscene deities for whom these richly but uncouthly decorated
shrines seem fitting habitations ; the Mussulman conquerors, who
transformed the Hindoo temples into mosques, beautified the country
with tho splendid tombs of themselves and their relatives ; and the
Taj Mahal, the central gem of Indian Saracenic art, is the
extravagant whim of an uxorious despot, carried out by the forced
labour of slaves.^ The great mcdia)val churches of Europe, which

(1) It is ii curious freak of architectural history, that tho nearest paiallol to this
last-named work, so far as origin and motiYe are concerned, should be found (under such
different social and political conditions) in the gew-gaw erection, with its gilt ginger-
bread decoration, which stands at Kensington. The parallel ends here, it must be
admitted. Whatever the possible virtues of the Indian lady commemorated by the
Taj Mahal, she received as adequate and beautiful a memorial of them as architecture
could furnish; while it is to tho credit of the late Prince Consort to say that nothing
could be moro out of keeping with his character than tho piece of architectural
tawdrincss erected as a tribute to his memory.

480

MODEBN ENGLISH AECHnECTURE.

form, in their union of logical construction with rich and picturesque
effect, the loftiest achievements of the architect, arose in obedience
to the aspirations of an ambitious and domineering religious caste,
backed more or less by that regal power which (with a keen instinct
as to their common interests) has so frequently played into the
hands of the priesthood ; and the funds for these great works were
obtained by a spiritual despotism perfectly effective in its results,
whether exercised publicly on a large scale, or privately in those
house-to-house visitations pictured in Chaucer's tale, where the
friar, having driven the cat off the most comfortable chair, seats
himself by the sick man's bedside to remark that —

“ 153 ” God, we owen fortio pound for stones.”

In all these instances, 'which include the greatest monuments of
the architecture of the past, we sec the art practised for the delight
or glorification of the few at the expense of the many — always the
work of a privileged caste of one description or another, and
generally, in its finest forms, practised in honour of the gods " or
of religion."

It is scarcely necessary to point out to any educated reader now,
that architecture, since the rise of the modern or rationalistic period,
has been practised on an essentially different basis from that which
governed all the great styles of the past. It has been not the
spontaneous and natural development of style from originating
constructive conditions, but the arbitrary selection of this or that
style of the past as in itself the most admirable, and therefore to be
used as a model for imitation. The radical distinction between this
post-Renaissance architecture and all that preceded it has been
familiarised to general readers by the works of M. Viollet-le-Duc in
France and of Mr. Fergusson in England, who have long laboured,
the first as a practical architect and archscologist, the second as a
theoretic critic, to show the essential falsity of the modern system.
In the architecture of the Italian Renaissance, indeed, the style of
the Romans (itself an adaptation or corruption of the Greek) was
used in a manner which realised a new and original expression,
though involving an aesthetic falsity (to be touched upon just
now) ; a manner which wo adopted in what may bo termed the
Wren period, with the loss, however, of much of its refinement. But
in the more recent period of the English revival, temples were
adopted wholesale and in their complete form to serve as churches,
as markets, as town-halls, as almost everything ; under the idea
that the Greek temple being the perfection of the art, and incapable
of improvement, we could not do better than reproduce it. The
praotioal. inconveniences resulting &om the adoption of forms of
building intended for different purposes and for a different climate.

MODEHN ENGLISH ABCHTEECTUBE.

481

as well as the ineffectiveness of a southern style in a northern atmo-
sphere, could not but soon force themselves into notice ; and the
recognition of these incompatibilities perhaps had a good deal to do,
in conjunction with other less easily estimated influences, in bring-
ing about the mediaeval revival, part of the cry of its votaries being
for our indigenous and “ Christian ” style. It is now ebb-tide with
the mediaeval revival ; but its effects remain, and may for some time
remain, involving anachronisms which have more than a merely
architectural influence, and the incongruity of which is hardly
appreciated as yet, while they tend at the same time to obscure the
perception of the essential excellence of mediaeval architecture, and
of its signiflcance as a subject for study and suggestion in relation
to the development of modern architecture.

Mediaeval art and architecture are in fact regarded at present, by
those who seem to concern themselves most with the subject, through
a highly coloured medium of semi-religious sentimentalism. Nor is
it surprising that such noble structures as our cathedrals, additionally
hallowed by tlieir association with the past, should stir such a feeling
among the weaker brethren, when even clear-headed and practical
philosophers confess to a love for crawling, though in a molluscous
fashion,^’ about their precincts, and commit themselves to indiscretions
about “ traceries.’^ It is difficult, no doubt, when contemplating the
weather-stained and venerable features of these monuments, about
which an atmosphere of calm and forgetfulness seems to hover (I
speak, of course, of those which have as yet escaped the voracity of
the restorer), and which appear to contrast our bustling and noisy
days with the quiet we attribute to the olden time, to realise the fact
that these structures had a totally different aspect and association
when now or in progress. True that they were ostensibly erected to
the glory of God ; ” true also that they exhibited, so far as the actual
cathedral building was concerned, a supremacy of the artistic over
the merely utilitarian elements of building such as is rarely attained
in the present day, or in structures which are not the productions of
a caste. But, in fact, the spirit of rivalry which prompted one con-
ventual establishment to outvie another in the splendour of its build-
ings, was as natural an outbreak of what is called, healthy anta-
gonism as that which leads two provincial towns to endeavour to
out-do each other in the costliness and extent of their town-halls or
exchanges. The construction of the stone vault, which was the great
glory of the mediaoval builders, and about which so many rhymesters
have rhymed (not to speak of one or two poets), was a very practical
matter indeed, involving knotty problems of stone-cutting and
balance of pressures, and arising out of no sentimental feeling about
'^embowed roofs,’^ but out of the logical endeavour to bring the
original Boman round vault into harmony with the conditions of

482

HODEEN ENGLISH AEGHITECIURE.

desigci and construction in the more complex Gothic building. So
little of the modem sentiment had the mediseval builders, that they
thought no more of removing and obliterating the work of a previous
generation of architects, and replacing it by a new building in the
style they had themselves arrived at, than a modem engineer would
think of removing an old bridge, constructed on an antiquated prin*
ciple, to replace it by an improved modern one. Tho conventual
buildings in connection with the church (and they formed a far
more important part, even architecturally speaking, of the entire
group than most spectators of their dilapidated vestiges at all
realise) were arranged and planned on a scheme just as practical
and matter-of-fact, in proportion to the sanitary knowledge and
social habits of the time, as that of a modern hotel — ^the place of
which, indeed, as the reader need hardly be reminded, the media3val
convent with its hospitiiim to a considerable extent fulfilled.

There was, in short, no glamour about medlocval architecture
during the course of its production and elaboration ; tho glamour is
only projected upon it in the phantasmagoria of modern enthusiasts*
Those who have traced the constructive history of the leading
features of Gothic architecture, know that no more in this than in
any other logically developed architectural style are its characteristic
features invented all at once in a fervour of sentimental aspiration ;
that buttress, vault, and pinnacle (and even in most cases the smaller
ornamental details) are the results of long and often-repeated efforts
to realise, first, the most practically sound use and application of the
materials in meeting the difficulties of construction, and, secondly
(or one should rather say simultaneously), the most effective disposi-
tion and decorative treatment of those materials consistent with a
strictly observed relation to their practical object: — ^to combine, in
other words, a homogeneous and logical construction with on equally
homogeneous and logical, but at the same time forcible and piquant,
expression of that construction, in which combination, speaking
broadly, architecture in its highest and severest form really consists.
In the great church which formed tho crowning feature of the con-
vent buildings, we come upon what may be called the poetry of
architecture, in which the utilitarian clement becomes entirely sub-
ordinate ; but even from this point of view the purely architectural
logic of these buildings, and their beauty and fitness of detail, con-
stitute their essential interest, quite apart from the halo of sentiment
which has been thrown round them, and of which their builders pro-
bably felt little or nothing. Our cathedrals, in short, owe their
existence to the ambition and rivalry of powerful religious commu-
idtieB/ and their completeness and unity of architectural style to the

(1) Astzikingf Instance of the kind of way in which this spirit of rivalry operated, exists
in the grand west front of Peterborough Cathedral, which appears to have been entirriy

uomm ENGLISH ABCHITEOIUBE.

483

genius of bold and aspiring builders, working out tbe constructive
and artistic problem that came into tbeir bands, witb a steadiness
and continuity of progress wbicb, in these days of distracted artistic
aims, seems almost like an intuition.

The architectural style that was developed by the mediaeval
builders had, like every art, its history of rise, and culmination, and
decline. As long as an art is a Uving art, and expressing the genuino
sympathies and aspirations of men, it can never be a stationary one : it
always aspires, it never looks back. But, as in the case of a Uving
organism, this very vitality includes the presage of ultimate decay and
extinction. The succeeding generations of mediaeval builders gained one
point after another in the completion of the constructive design of
their buildings, refined and refined upon the originally broad and
pure decorative characteristics of the style, always with a new, though
a fading, grace and luxuriance, till at last its extreme capabiUties
were exhausted, and it simply went out — died of old age; and
almost simultaneously died the social motive and spirit which had
been its occasion of existence. That time of change came, the
significance of which Mr. Froude has so pathetically expressed : —

“Tho paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things
were passing away, and the faith and life of ten centuries were dissolving like
a dream. Chivalry was dying ; the Abbey and the Castle were soon together
to cnunblo into ruins, and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old
world were passing away, never to return. ... In the fabric of habit in which
they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind wore to remain no
longer.

And now it is all gone — like an insubstantial pageant faded ; and between
us and tho old English thero lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our
imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the
Cathedrals, only as wo gazo upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs,
Bonio faint conceptions float before us of what these men wore when they were
afivo ; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the
mediaeval ago, which falls upon tho oar like tho echo of a vanished world.”

an afterthought to cut out the builders of Ely, who, after tho commencement of the
Fetorborough west end as originally intended, started their own west front to out-do tho
Poterborough establishment, and thus spurred on the latter to the erection of their gprand
portico, with its throe great arches the whole height of the front, to throw the Ely folk into
the shade again. Tho rivalry had an earlier stage also, when tho Feterhoroiigh navo was
extended in response to a previous challenge from Ely, the variations in the stylo and
details fixing tho rdativo dates indubitably. The real significance of these rapid
changes and extensions of plan was, I believe, first brought out by Mr. Edmund Sharpe
(author of ** Architectural Parallels,*’ &c., &c.), whoso services to all students of architec-
ture, in tho elucidation and illustration of the great mediasval buildings, from the
architoctural and not from tho clerical or sentimental point of view, can hardly be
overestimated.

It is impossible to avoid noticing how essentially similar is this rivalry of the medimval
convents in their structures to that of modem railway companies ; each company that
builds a new terminus endeavouring to have a bigger and grander hotel in front than
any other, and a station roof of wider span.

484

MODEBX ENGLISH ABCHITECTUBE.

Buty while the soul had thus departed of medieDval life, the body,
the building, remained ; and a very important element it is in the part
that architecture plays in its relation to modem life especially, that its
productions have this g^j^ast-permanent character, and cannot be put
aside and forgotten like a picture or a book which appeals to tastes that
have become antiquated. There the cathedrals stand, memorials and
landmarks of what wcro once the main centres of English life, wit-
nesses of a spiritual despotism whose staff has been long since broken ;
records, too, of strenuous healthy labour and ingenuity applied, with no
haphazard or wavering aim, towards the translation of bmte material
into an organic expression of stability and grace and aspiration,
which still commands our sympathy and admiration. And no man
who understands in what the art of architecture in its higher forms con-
sists, none who have an interest in the past history, intellectual and
social, of their native country, would for a moment undervalue these
monuments at once of a great period of architectural art and of an
extinct phase of national life, or grudge any care or reasonable cost
bestowed on their preservation. But it is quite another thing to
imagine that the feeling, artistic or moral, out of which they sprung
can be artificially revived, and the medioDval cathedral galvanised
into life again. This, however, is a prevalent idea with a number of
well-meaning people of the dileUantc order ; and one writer, who is
a fair specimen of the educated Philistine, has put forth a formal
plea in favour of *^The Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century.^'
Now, do these good people rcaUy imagine that they can revivify
the mediaeval cathedral, either architecturally or in its supposed
moralising influences, unless they can first restore the condition of
art, and of thought, and of society under which the originals arose ?
Their cathedral of the nineteenth century would simply be a huge
mediaeval toy, and a toy which could not be put out of sight or
otherwise disposed of when the partial cry for it had subsided.
Enough of this has been done on a smaller scale already te leave to
our descendants a very remarkable legacy of architectural curi-
osities. Under the influence of a kind of ecclesiastical or ecclesio-
logical revival, which cannot in the nature of things be permanent,
the country has been covered with churches, in designing which the
avowed intention has been to mimic, to reproduce as far as possible,
the architectural detail and arrangement of medioeval churches — a
mimicry which has been known to be carried out so completely as to
deceive (if it were possible) even the elect, when the work had be-
come somewhat weather-stained, into a belief in its genuine antiquity-—
happy culmination of the labour of a lifetime. In the majority of
coses, however, the imitation has been tasteless, feeble, and entirely
the spirit of genuine medimval work; and, what is in a
practical sense more serious, these buildings are utterly useless for

MODEBN ENGLISH ABCHITECmTBE.

anything except ecclesiological church services, and, are in fact quite
unfitted even for the public worship of the church as generally
celebrated at present, except on merely sentimental grounds: the
whole thing is a kind of Joseph Surface architecture, consisting
entirely of “ sentiment.” What will bo the ultimate fate of all these
structures, when the ecclesiastical mania subsides, might form a
curious subject of speculation.

On the other hand, the influence exercised by the existing cathe-
drals, as the centres of church architecture, is noticeable. It is not
improbable, though it would be difficult no doubt to prove, that the
mere existence of these great buildings, the legacies of the conventual
period, is in a great degree accountable for the ecclesiological revival
wo have recently witnessed. The buildings are groat facts, recalling
and illustrating the power of the mediaeval church, and moreover
they are structures whicli no one would willingly let die, while at
the same time they seem too large and important buildings to be left
standing without being put to some practical use. This last con-
sideration has been really and openly operative in bringing into
fashion the popular services and the choral and other celebrations
whereby the naves of our cathedrals arc now beginning to be

utilised.” The eflcct upon the clergy of the possession or custody
of these buildings is rather amusing. Because tho cathedrals were
the erections originally of a powerful clergy, their present tenants
and custodians seem to imagine that they wield the same sort of social
and political power in their generation ; as if matters were unchanged
as long as the material building was unshaken. The fact that the
cathedrals, the highest achievements of English architecture, were
built under the instigation of a clerical caste, seems to beget also
in tho modem cathedral cleric an odd sort of idea that the archi-
tectural mantle of the original founders has descended upon
him — that he is by tho fact of his cathedral connection an
authority and a light on the subject of architecture generally.
Tho relation of tho clergy to church architecture, is, however, a
question of some public importance in regard to the conservation
of the cathedrals. Whatever be the legal position of the matter
(which the present writer has no qualification for discussing), there
can be no doubt that morally the cathedrals are the property of the
nation, as national, historical, and architectural monuments, rather
than of the Church as it now exists. When they were built, the
Church which founded them was the great intellectual, social, and in
many respects political power in the land. The Church of the pre-
sent day is, in regard to the great affairs of the nation, and to modern
intellectual life generally, of the nature of a dummy ; and we have
a right to look with some jealousy on tho interference with the in-
tegrity and reality of some of the cathedrals, carried on under the

HOBEBN ENGLISH ABCmTECTUBE.

486 ;

name of restoration, and with the sanction and encouragement of
the clergy. Whatever is necessary to preserve the structures from
fidling into decay should be done ; but matters are carried much
further than this, and the interest and true history of some of the
cathedrals have already been almost entirely obliterated by wholesale
renovations, evidently carried out in no mere conservative spirit
(whatever may bo pretended), but from a desire for the icUt attendant
upon the proceeding, and a wish to give a sort of now birth to a
church foundation — ^providing a whited sepulchre where there is
nothing but a defunct body within. What is thus destroyed or over-
laid is what no possible power can restore ; once gone, the old archi-
tectural work is gone for ever ; and it is really time that something
should be done to prevent the chance of the whole of our greatest
architectural monuments being turned into new modern-mediseval
buildings, under pretence of preserv^ing them. If Sir John Lubbock,
who takes so much interest in the preservation of older historic monu-
ments, would bring in a bill to prevent deans and their architects
from doing what they please with those equally important national
possessions, the cathedrals, he would be doing a good service, and
would earn the thanks of many who see with deep regret that sub-
stitution of new copies for the old realities, by which the genuine
interest of our great historic buildings is being destroyed.

That the media3val revival, notwithstanding the impulse which it
has unquestionably given to the study of architecture, and even, in
a degree, to the cultivation of public taste in regard to building, has
been found wonting — that there is no real life in it, as hitherto prac-
tised, for the development of modem architecture— has recently
become pretty evident even to many of its warmest supporters. The
various receipts which have been propounded for putting life into it,
and making it a reality, afford curious evidence of the doubt and
confusion of feeling on the subject. One theory is that the study of
the higher arts of design, the power of drawing the figlire and of
designing sculpture for his building, would raise the architect once
more to the true height of his art. Considering what is the nature
of the figure drawing and sculpture in the windows and niches of
the Gothic cathedrals, in regard to technical power of drawing and
design, it must be pretty evident that it is not upon these adjuncts
that their effect depends ; just as, on the other hand, it is equally
evident that his splendid power of designing the figure did not pre-
serve such a genius as Michelangelo from the most flagrant sins
against architectural logic and good taste even in St. Peter’s, and
still more in his earlier architectural attempts. Moreover, as it is
apparent that even a sole and lifelong devotion to the arts of painting
or sculpture only enables a few men to produce anything beyond
mediocrity, and as the architect necessarily could not give the same

MODERN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE. 487

time and study to these arts, it is difficult to see what would be
gained by all our architects turning themselves into mediocre
sculptors and painters. Another receipt, given with even greater
•confidence, is in entire opposition to this. Because the word
architect ’’ nowhere occurs in the records of the mediscval buildings,
nor anything which can be positively said to be its precise equiva-
lent, it is assumed that these great structures arose of themselves, as
it were, by a kind of unanimous impulse among workmen having no
•chief instructor, and working upon no preconcerted plan. The
inference, of course, is obvious : take away the architect, forbid the
making of any preliminary drawings, turn loose a band of inspired
workmen'* upon the site, and tho building will *^rise like an
exhalation," and repeat all the glory of mediaeval architecture in
the most natural and simple manner. This, which has been termed
the inspired workman theory," was promulgated in its most
uncompromising form by an ‘inspired" writer in the Quarterly
Revmc^ whose utterly rabid and revolutionary sentiments formed at
least a laughable contrast to the habitual tone of that publication.
Mr. Fergusson, who is, of course, entitled to a respectful hearing,
has taken up a line of argument very similar to this, though put in
a more moderate manner. The following passage, in which he
instances the Crystal Palace as a building carried out in the same
spirit as the mediaeval cathedrals, is worth quotation as a typical
statement of his case : —

“ No material is usod in it (the Crystal Palaco) which is not the best for its
purpose, no constructive expedient employed which was not absolutely essen-
tial, and it depends wholly for its effect on the arrangement of its parts and the
display of its construction. So essentially is its principle the same which, as
wo have seen, animated Gothic architecture, that we hardly know even now
how much of tho design belongs to Sir Joseph Paxton, how much to the con-
tractors, or how much to tho subordinate officers employed by the Company.”

In that case the bust of Paxton on the tcrraco at Sydenham ought
to be surrounded by a crowd of little busts, down to tho men who
put the rivets in. But our ignorance as to who really designed the
building, if it be granted, does not prove that it designed itself. It
was, moreover, a structure built in a hurry and against time * and,
as Mr- Fergusson himself observes, architecture will not be revived
by buildings so essentially ephemeral as this. Nor, even if we
accept the theory of the spontaneous generation of the mediaeval
cathedrals, could we by any possibility revive, since the advent of
the printing-press and , the locomotive, the state of intellectual and
artistic naivete which such a theory presupposes.

The real mistake at the root of modem architecture is the senti-
mental archa}ology which seems to have absolutely taken possession
of it, and of which Mr. Fergusson's receipt itself partakes, since it
in reality only suggests that by going back to the supposed habits

488

MOBEBN ENGLISH ARCHHECTUBE.

of a former age we can produce what the present age wants. Even
the engineers (who in some ways stand, more nearly than any other
body of men, in the same position in regard to the present day as the
medisDval masons did to their own time) are bitten by this ; and
when they wish to make a structure ornamental,” they have no
idea but to dress it in some borrowed plumes of classic or medisBval
architecture. The influence of sentiment has been exhibited in a still
more curious manner in a recent great building, the Albert Hall.
This, which is the design of engineers, is a rather remarkable building,
and exhibits some of the characteristics of a work constructed on
genuine architectural principles. The details arc coarse and com-
monplace, for it seems impossible to beat into the head of an
engineer that some training and education of the eye and the judg-
ment is necessary for the production of suitable and refined orna-
mental detail ; but plan, construction, and design form a united and
interdependent whole, arising as they do in a strictly logical manner
one out of the other. The unfortunate point is that the plan is
utterly wrong, to begin with, for the purpose of the building ; and it
is so entirely from the sentimental worship of precedent which led
the designer, instead of considering what was the best plan for the
purpose, to start with the idea of reproducing the Homan amphi-
theatre, although a moment’s consideration ought to have rendered it
evident, as a mere matter of ordinary common sense, that the plan
of a building for seating people round a circumference to witness a
spectacle in the centre, could by no possibility furnish the proper
model for one in which they were to listen to music performed at
one end of the building. Hut it is to such incongruities that people
are led through forgetting that architecture is not (except in very
rare instances) a pure art, governed by aesthetic or sentimental con-
siderations ; that it is the artistic or effective expression of practical
requirements which must govern and form the basis of the whole.
It is in further emphasizing this condition of architecture that the
possibility of making it a genuine intellectual pursuit, and not a
mere toy, really consists.

After what has been said above about receipts, it will not be sup-
posed that there is any intention hero of offering another new and
infiillible one; but it is possible to point to modem examples in which
this treatment of architectural effect on a practical basis has been so far
realised as to indicate at least a direction in which the art may receive
a new development. There is a large building at present in progress
— ^the new Town Hall in Manchester — ^the internal plan and arrange-
ment of which affords an admirable instance of novel and picturesque
effect, obtained simply as the natural result of the masterly and com-
plete, manner in which the very intricate internal economy of a great
hive of multifarious departments is reduced to simplicity and order.

HODEBN ENGLISH ABCmTECTUBE.

m

The exterior of Mr. Waterhouse^s building, it must be admitted,
belongs to the sentimental school of architecture; it has ho very close
or necessary connection with the internal plan ; it is thought pictur-
esque at present, and may or may not be thought so under future
changes of taste; but the treatment of the interior will command
admiration always, because its excellence is of a kind which is prac-
tical as well as picturesque, and is independent of mere changes in
architectural fashion. The same sort of excellence, on a grander
scale, is exemplified in the Houses of Parliament, which the design-
ers of the Albert Hall will probably be surprised to be told is, in its
main scheme, a much more practical, as well as more beautiful, piece
of architecture than their building. It is so unquestionably;
its plan is a most effective and yet perfectly simple and practical
expression of the objects of the various parts of the building and their
relation to one another, and all the principal features of the exterior
design arise out of, and emphasize, the leading peints of the plan. The
style ” of the Houses of Parliament is an utter mistake ; it was the
deliberate selection for imitation of a bad and weak phase of late
mediaeval architecture. But for this its architect was not responsible;
and when a building fulfils the conditions of practical, and at the same
time effective, grouping and construction, the details are of secondary
consequence. The question of plan is more especially the basis of
modern architecture on a large scale, because most large modem
buildings are far more intricate in their purposes and requirements
than was the case with ancient buildings, of which the larger ones
were, as already observed, mostly temples, consisting principally of
one great apartment, and presenting accordingly a far more simple
and straightforward, and also a more purely scsthetic, problem than
modern structures of the same dimensions.

But if architecture always has required and must require edifices
on a great scale, and rising more or less beyond utilitarian objects,
for her greatest effects, is there not also something to be done on a
less ambitious scale — something, nevertheless, equally important,
and which, having scarcely as yet received any adequate attention,
presents a good deal of the suggestiveness always accompanying a
new problem P It is only within the last century or so that we have
had what may be called an architecture of the people — a style of the
many, a vernacular of building, the results of which we see in
those miles upon miles of dull brick walls with oblong holes in them
which form the lining of the streets of London and of most of our
large towns. This style was developed first when English archi-
tecture, after the decease of the Gothic spirit, had sunk through
various grades of ppeudo-classicism to the primness of the square
brick architecture and round knobs of the Queen Anne period,
which only required to have its few decorative features shorn off to
VOL. XX. N.S. L L

490

HOBEBK ENGLISH ABCHTFECTUBE.

make a serviceable general builder’s style, for flanking tbe streets of
towns, while separate slices of it were stuck about the land aa
country houses. The weight which these dreary acres of brick lay
upon our daily lives is perhaps hardly felt or recognised, because we
have come to accept it as the normal state of things. There are
signs, however, of a growing dissatisfaction with the present state of
town architecture, and a possibility of that demand for something
better arising which must necessarily precede the supply ; and any
amelioration of street architecture must also follow the law of modern
architectural design, and commence first from the basis of practical
considerations. The sanitary conditions of life in large towns, as
affecting the arrangement and construction of dwellings, form, or
^ould form, a very important element in influencing the town
architecture of the future. The increasing value of building-sites,
and the simultaneous increase of population, suggest new expedients
in the method of building toAvn houses, such as the introduction of
the Paris system of houses in flats,” which has been a good deal
talked about and even tried in London, but not as yet in an adequate
manner. Such a system, if adopted at all extensively, would, how-
ever, exercise a very important influence on street architecture by
rendering almost necessary, and at the same time facilitating, in an
economical point of view, the employment of a far more solid and
sounder construction, and affording opportunity for realising a higher
architectural character than has ever hitherto been attained in this
department of building in England. Something like this system has
also been a good deal employed in carrying out the excellent work
of providing healthy homes for the poorer inhabitants of towns at
rents commensurate with their means. It must, however, be matter
for regret to observe how little the possibility of rendering these
model homes attractive in appearance, as well as sanitary in
arrangement, is considered. Nothing could vreil be more unhome-
like, nothing more repellent to the eye, or devoid of every gracious
and pleasing association, than the aspect of some of these stacks of
building in various towns in which families are to make their homes.
Surely some effort may be made to give them a more attractive and
picturesque, a less mill-like, appearance — ^to give some characteristic
variety also to the various tenements, instead of their damnable
iteration” of the same arrangement of doors and windows in so
many rows. This is considered, I am well aware, to be simply a
question of remunerative return ; but ought it to be entirely so P
Or is ithere not, even on public grounds, some sort of return to be
considered and thought of besides that of so much per cent. P

Architecture, however, is an art, though an art involved with, and
mostly arising out of, practical and scientific problems ; and if We
come to consider what sort of form the hopedrfor development of our

IfODEBN EKGLISH ABCHITEOTUBE.

m

town architecture, either in great buildings or in streets, should take,
it is here that the study of our mediasval architecture comes in as an
inspiration. There are two species of architectural art : that which
ornaments the exterior of a building with a kind of screen or scenic
design of features arbitrarily selected for their supposed elegance, but
having no direct connection with the plan and construction of the
building ; and that in which the constructive design is itself tho
foundation of tho architectural effect and expression, and is merely
decorated so far, and in such a way, as to give relief and emphasis to
this constructive expression ; any decoration which does not conduce
to this being, in fact, beside the mark and an excrescence. Of the
first-named species the most familiar type is that which is called
Italian, having been evolved by the Italian architects of the Renais-
sance, and consisting of an application of some of the principal
features of Greek and Roman architecture (pilasters, columns,
small pediments, &c.) to tho exterior of a building by way of orna-
ment. This style arose under tho influence of that classic revival in
literature which led to the exclusive worship of ‘‘ tho antique ” as
the only source of true culture; and it is remarkable how this
jjrestige has clung to the style, insomuch that, until very recently,
when any question of architectural style in connection with some
public building came before the legislature, it was almost invariably
the case that the Liberal party were in favour of a classic style, sup-
posing it to be essentially connected with progress and culture, and
the Conservatives hoisted the Gothic colours, as the champions of the
past and of mcdiacvalism. Both sides were about equally in the
wrong. Without denying that very pleasing and very elegant
buildings — compositions they may be called — ^have been created on
the Renaissance principle; without saying that there may not be
occasions and circumstances under which it may be fitly employed
in a purely decorative architecture (though it would be difficult
perhaps to name them), it is evident that architectural design, as
thus employed, is little more than a toy, with no more real relation
to the practical basis of building than is to be found in the imitative
medisDval churches before referred to.

For the principle of all real and true architecture is the same —
a decorative treatment based upon and emphasizing the plan and
construction of the building ; and in this point of view the Greek
and the Gothic are tho two truest and most perfect styles of the
world, the only essential distinction between them being that the
G^ek works out with perfect completeness and unity of expression
a trabeated construction, and the Goth works out with equal com-
pleteness an arcuated construction. In all that constitutes the
essence of architectural style, Salisbury Oathedral and the Sainte
Ohapelle have ffir more affinity with the Parthenon, than have the

L L 2

492

HOBEBN ENGLiaS ABGHTCEarnBE.

artificial constructions of Palladio and Vignola. And Ghreek archi-
tecture^ in its refined and reticent beauty, is full of suggestion for
the modem architect ; supplying, it may perhaps be said, the
element demanded by modem culture and civilisation, while the
study of Gothic supplies the element of strength and reality which
has been so long absent from our architecture, and which is to be
acquired not by copying and imitating mediscval forms, but by
cultivating a sympathy with the method and feeling of that grand
and masculine school of architecture, and thereby acquiring the
power of giving to the new practical forms of modem building their
appropriate and picturesque expression, arising from the tmthful
treatment of materials and constmetion rather than from applied or
misapplied ornament. Eeticence in this last respect is one of the
lessons we need most, in regard to London architecture especially.
There is often more so-called '^ornament” on one railway hotel
than would be found on half-a-dozen cathedrals of the greatest age
of mediaeval art ; and the principle has yet to be learned by most
of our architects, that every ornamental detail which does not assist
the expression of a building injures it.

It is remarkable how very little has really been made, amid all
the bustlo of architectural revival in recent years, of the higher
class of dwelling-houses as opportunities for something of what may
be called the poetry of architecture. “ Handsome houses, and
more lately ^‘picturesque*’ houses, have no doubt been built by
scores; but they seem to go very much on prevailing patterns
which succeed one another, like the fashions in dress, for no particular
reason. The old notion of the typical English gentleman used to be
that it was vulgar to have a house which difiered materially or in
any striking way from that of your neighbours. Surely it is that
idea itself which rather deserves the epithet vulgar, even in the
literal sense of the word. A great deal that is charming, a great deal
of what constitutes the picturesque of life, might be realised -in the
interiors, especially, of the higher class of dwellings, if they were
made the opportunity for the exercise of original thought and indi-
vidual taste and feeling in their arrangement and decoration, instead
of being so mechanically contrived on habitual and accepted schemes.

There has no doubt l^cn a great advance in good taste as to house
furniture and fittings of late years; and the monstrosities which
used to crowd the windows of cabinet-makers would be scouted' now.
But a good deal of this, it must be confessed, is nothing more than
another revival. A recent turn of popular thought has led to a
kind of resuscitation of the art of what Tennyson rather happily calls
the tea-cup times.” So far as architecture is concerned, this
revival of the Queen Anne style seems the most rubbishy and con-
, temptible of all, since there is not even the excuse of an inherent

liOBEBN ENGLISH ABOHlTECIVfiE.

493

grandeur in the style ; it is the last lingering debasement of Eenais-
sance architecture^ the corruption of a corruption. The style of
decorative art which belongs to it has a certain fitness and suitability
to recommend it for interiors, though it is anything but intellectual,
and is followed more as a matter of fashion than of deliberate opinion ;
indeed, it is impossible to avoid a disagreeable conviction of the im-
posture pervading the present mania for aesthetic fittings, Japanese
jars and old china, and Queen Anne furniture and costumes; a
mania which is carried so far that, as those who know anything of
the ways of these disciples of the sosthetic must be aware, the joke in
Punch about the gentleman who preferred the shorter of two sisters
for a wife to the taller, because “ she would go better with my style
of furniture — buhl and marqueterie, you know” — ^is scarcely an
exaggeration of literal fact. There is something contemptible in
this exaltation of the mere decoration of life (a sham decoration, too)
above the reality; and something quite apart from real artistic
feeling, than which, in its true sense, nothing can harmonise better
with that “ plain living and high thinking,” the decay of which
was so feelingly deplored by Wordsworth, and from which we seem
so very, very far at present.

Once more : architecture in its most important manifestations is
directly connected \Wth public as well as private life, and to recom-
mend itself to the predominant public opinion of the day, to be in
harmony with the real tendency of modern political life, it must cast
itself loose from the sentimental prejudices which would connect it
only with the old order of things, and study to reach forward to those
things which are before. It is unfortunate that the leading members
of the profession at present seem to be almost entirely neglectful
to discern the signs of the times, and to be connected by
their sympathies and associations with what by most thinking men
are regarded as outworn conditions of life and opinion. The
influence of this upon architecture is being illustrated in the carry-
ing out of the largest and most costly public building of the day.
There can be nothing unkind or unfair in saying of Mr. Street, who
is entrusted wdth the building of the new Law Courts, what he has
himself repeatedly and publicly professed that ho is entirely bound,
by conviction and sympathy, to an absolute belief in the dogmas, the
sentiment, and the artistic practice and ritual of the mediseval Church.
The result of this is, that the new Law Courts are being clothed in
a mediaeval garb of the most uncompromising type, reproducing the
ancient cathedral style even to the niches for the statues of saints,
perhaps to be filled in this case (in a sufficiently different manner)
by those of great legal lights. That there will be a certain power
and grandeur in the building when complete there can be little
doubt, for no living English architect has more the faculty of putting

494

MODEBN BKGLISH AROHIIECTUBE.

the impress of power on his work; and he has built churches of
which it may be aaid (what can hardly be said of any other modem-
medisBYal work) that they have the real feeling and force of original
medimval architecture without being literal copies. But it is to be
feared that this great building, whatever merits in detail it may have
(and they ought to be great, since it has ousted a design confessedly
superior in plan) ^ will remain to future generations as a piece of false
architectural sentiment, entirely contradictory of 4;he real intellectual
history of this century.

But a far more serious instance of this false sentiment has been
seen in the recent proposal for decorating St. Paul’s Cathedral. Those
who are not aware of the extent to which modem architectural prac-
tice is combined with the worship of all sorts of superstitions, would
perhaps scarcely credit the fact that the most important and costly
portion of this scheme, estimated at about half a million, as drawn out
by the architect engaged by the committee (against whoso ability as an
artist not a word is here hinted), was to consist of mosaic decorations
representing not only prophets, apostles, and angels (with gold plates
behind their heads), but the whole tag-rag and bob-tail of apocry-
phal church saints with their legendary symbols ; and this, the only
cathedral which is in some degree associated, and was intended by
its architect to be associated, with the new intellectual life of the
modem period,^ was thus to be made a receptacle for all the ecolesio-
logical lumber of past ages. What sort of laughing-stock the thing
would have been, as time went on, if this absurd and barbarous
puerility had really been stereotyped in imperishable material,
may well be imagined by those whose brains are not addled.
The very proposition of such a scheme adds force to what
was said above as to the necessity of having some governmental
control over the treatment of buildings which ore, morally speaking,
the interest and property of the whole nation. On the other
hand, the normal attitude of our Government towards public
works of architecture is far too grudging and illiberal. It is with
the greatest difficulty that small grants can be extracted for the
pursuance, for instance, of important archseological investigations in
different ports of the world — a matter in which France has, in not a
few instances, set our statesmen a noble example. And I remember
taking note of a debate in regard to the expenditure of money on
the architectural embellishment of the Law Courts, in which every
q>eaker (even among those who habitually figure as patrons ” of
art) who ventured to lift up his voice in favour of a liberal treatment

(1) It is foaredy neoesBary to remind the reader that Wren's original plan was for
a wide centeal area, as most appropriate for the ''reformed worship," and that he
" wda dee|dy phagrined at being compelled, by court influence, to adopt the old medissval
or porooessional plan.

HOBEBK SXaLISH ABCH lTJi C rUH E,

495

of the building, did bo in the most amusingly humble and apologetic
manner, and amid profuse professions of his wish to consider the
subject “ entirely from a practical point of view ” — as if any expen-
diture of public money on mere art were something to be ashamed
of. Members of Parliament, however, will be quite ready to take a
different view of these things when they know that their constituents
expect it from them. It is to the development of a higher
standard of culture and refinement among the middle and lower
classes that we must look to supply that stimulus to architecture
W’hich it formerly owed to the taste or ambition of aristocratic castes.
Perhaps, in turn, it may not unreasonably be demanded of the
architectural profession that they should show a higher and more
unselfish spirit of devotion to their calling in its noblpst aspect than
is often seen ; a less conspicuous readiness to undertake, for mere lucre,
multifarious commissions which can only be carried out mechanically
and by proxy : another matter which they manage better in France,
as the lives of some eminent French architects do most honourably
testify. Nor must it be forgotten that the moral tone of a nation has
a most appreciable influence upon its architecture, which always, in
a certain sense, reflects a portion of the spirit of the times. It is
because a number of persons worship ecclesiastical shams that the
country is covered with mock-mediaeval churches. It is because
speculating builders are destitute of common honesty that an
immense proportion of our dwelUngs are ugly, ricketty, and un-
healthy ; and that the clumsy machinery of Building Acts (presses
to squeeze the life and individuality out of city architecture) is
necessary to ensure the most ordinary attention to proper sanitary
and constructive conditions. It is because success in trade is based
on ostentation and puffing rather than on honourable dealing, that
our shop architecture stands upon sheets of plate-glass, and is
bedizened with wooden and ^‘compo*’ pilasters and cornices. Only
as our national life itself becomes more true and healthful in tone, can
we hope to realise the conditions under which a modem architecture
may arise, no longer the expression of mere archseological sentiment,
or of the partial sympathies of a religious, a social, or an msthetic
clique, but the endeavour after a more truthful and beautiful frame-
work to their daily life on the part of the people at large.

H. H. Statham.

THE AMERICAN CENTENARY.

The hundredth anniversary of American independence was cele-
brated in a becoming manner^ but rather in the way of a duty to be
performed, or an extensive business transaction, than as a civic
festival. The fourth of July will long continue to be a national
holiday, but during tho past quarter of a century there has been a
growing tendency to look upon it as a necessary evil, and to regard
the orator of the day in the light of a bore. The racket of gun-
powder and the broiling procession with their attendant casualties
are a pretty severe strain upon all except juvenile patriotism.
Declamation against the evil practices of George III. ceased to find
any real echo in America after they ceased to find any defenders in
England. What remains is a deep reverence for the soldiers and
statesmen of the revolutionary period. This is suflBcient to give
permanence to the national anniversary, and it is to be hoped it may
never grow less.

What sort of political development has been worked out by the
United States during the century now past, is a question susceptible
of more than one answer. Taken in its broadest sense, however, it
would appear to be that whereas certain British colonies, independent
of each other, did unite together a hundred years ago for the purpose
of resisting unjust measures on the part of the mother country, they
have employed the intervening time, down to the year 1805, in
getting rid of colonial traditions, prejudices, and encumbrances, and
becoming consolidated as a nation. He who sees in the war of the
rebellion only a struggle between slavery and freedom, sees but a
part of the issues involved, and ignores the largest chapter of
American history. He who sees in it only a strife for don^niou
on the one side and independence on the other, takes an equally
narrow and one-sided view. The struggle between state sovereignty
and national sovereignty commenced immediately upon the conclu-
sion of peace with Great Britain, and continued without intermission
down to the overthrow of the rebellion, but the only element capable,
according to human ken, of bringing it to the arbitrament of arms
was African slavery. On the other hand, it is highly improbable
that the slaveholding States would have resorted to arms if they had
not been educated during three generations to believe that they had
a constitutional right to nullify the acts of the general government,
or, as the late President Lincoln termed it, a constitutional right to
overturn the constitution.”

The recent work of Professor Yon Holst, now accessible in

THE AHEBICAH GENTENABT.

497

Englisli/ throws a strong and steady light upon the conflict of ideas
which divided parties^ sections, and states from the adoption of the
constitution down to a very recent period. Although this conflict has
seldom been out of the mouths of statesmen, although it has filled
more printed pages and newspaper columns than any other question,
it was reserved for a foreign writer to trace the windings of the
stream from its fountain head, through the thickets and quicksands
of near a hundred years, to its dihoucimient in the war of the rebel-
lion. The bird’s-eye view is best obtained from the distance, and
when, as in the present case, the author has made preparations for
his survey by long and careful study on tho ground itself, we are
not lurpriscd to find things brought to view which had been
obscured to Americans by their very nearness. A completeness and
roundness are also given to the whole which has hitherto been want-
ing, and which are worthy of the highest praise. A Swiss lawyer
gave the first finished exposition of the English Constitution, and a
French philosopher the most perspicuous treatise on Democracy in
America ; and now wc arc indebted to a German professor for the
most comprehensive work on the political development of the United
States.

The point from which this development is to be traced is the
colonial period, in which we find thirteen communities dependent
upon Great Britain, and more attached to her than to each other,
reluctantly compelled to draw the sword in defence of the dearest
rights of freemen. Some sort of union was necessary to make the
resistance effectual ; and when the colonics came together in consul-
tation very crude notions prevailed as to their legal status. A few
men even then perceived the incongruity of a dual sovereignty — ^that
of the State and of the United States — ^but tho great majority, both
of leaders and led, assumed as a fact that the declaration of inde-
pendence, although not tho act of any colony by itself, nor yet of all
^ the colonies separately, but the act of all in unison, had .had the
\effect to make them each sovereign ; and in this frame of mind they
proceeded to construct the loose political harness called the Con-
federation, a thing of shreds and patches which with difficulty held
together during the war, and which, after peace had been declared,
became the laughing-stock of foreign governments, the winding-sheet
of the public 'credit, and tho execration of George Washington.
Although the title of this document was Articles of Confederation
and Perpetual Union, the sovereignty of the States was expressly
declared, and the powers of the Confederation were so extremely

(1) **The Constitutional History of the United States,*’ by Dr. H. Yon Holst, Professor
at the University of Freiburg. Translated from the German by John J. Lalor and
Alfred B. Mason. Yol. I., State Sovereignty and Slavery. Chicago : Callaghan A Co.
1876.

498

THS AMEBIGAN OENTEKABY.

attenuated that no money could be raised by taxation, direct or
indirect, except by jEissessment upon the States, which they could,
pay or not as they pleased. The war had left the Confederation
heavily in debt. Various devices were resorted to for obtaining the
means to meet the maturing obligations of the Government. A
multitude of set-offs and excuses were offered by the little
sovereignties in place of cash, and, of course, the more honourable
among them would not continue to pay if the less honourable con-
tinued to shirk. Assessments having failed to accomplish anything,
it was proposed to ash the States to allow the general government
to collect taxes within their borders. The right to impose internal
taxes was peremptorily refused, but after some delay all the Igtates,
except New York, granted the right to collect duties on imports.
New York went so far as to concede her customs duties to the general
government, provided they should be collected by her own officers
and her own depreciated State scrip should be receivable for duties.
These conditions were, of course, inadmissible, and so it happened
that the new member of the family of nations became independent
and bankrupt at about the same time. The external pressure of war
being removed, all the ante-revolutionary conceptions of government
revived, excepting only that of allegiance to Great Britain. Even
the degrading spectacle of public insolvency did mot avail to bring
the States closer together. Colonial rights had blossomed into State
rights. Some of the forms of government had been changed, but the
ideas remained substantially the same as before. It was not until
the varying customs duties of the several States and the hostile com-
mercial legislation of England had prostrated trade and brought
private bankruptcy on the heels of public, that the States began to
consider the expediency of surrendering some of their reserved
powers in order to give greater efficiency to the whole. The Gon-
ventimi which framed the constitution of the United States had its
origin in a conference called by the State of Virginia to regulate the
trade and navigation of the Potomac Biver and Chesapeake Bay.

A long and doubtful struggle ensued in the Convention between
colonial prejudice and national necessity. Things reached so desperate
a pass that Franklin proposed prayers to Almighty God, for that the
wit of man had been exhausted.^ Necessity finally triumphed over
prejudice in the Convention, but the victory of the national party only
led to a fiercer and more protracted contest in the States over the ques-
tion of ratifying the constitution. That the Convention did in express
terms declare the constitution and the laws and treaties made in pur-

(1) **The hope of ultimate success must have’ been small indeed, when such a pr<^-
sition could be made by Franklin, strongly inclined as he was to rationalism, a man
UfSio at heart was averse to all religious demonstration, and who, even in the darkest
hours of the war, had carried his head very high.” — ^Von Holst, p. dl.

the AMEBICAN GENTEXAET.

guance of it to be tbe supreme law of the land, and did provide for
the establishment of courts to have jurisdiction of all cases arising under
said constitution, laws, and treaties, can be seen by reference to the
instrument itself. But a discussion of the alleged right of a State to
nullify an act of Congress would be premature at this place, since
that was the question almost continuously in dispute till it was settled
in 1861-5 by the wager of battle. It is certain that the right of a
State to secede from the Union after once entering it was freely
discussed at the time and was decided in the negative. Both New
York and Virginia desired to ratify with conditions, reserving the
right to withdraw if the conditions were not complied with. They
were told plainly that this could not be done — that they must ratify
or reject unconditionally. Virginia ratified in this manner at last by
88 votes against 80 in her Convention, and New York by 31 against
29.^ Massachusetts took a long time to deliberate, and eventually
ratified by 187 votes against 168. The most effective advocates of
the constitution were Hamilton in New York and Madison in Vir-
ginia — ^two States whose ratification was most important, and at the
same time most difficult to obtain. We shall soon see to what con-
trary conclusions Hamilton and Madison came in their interpretation
of the ratified instrument. The whole history of the period goes to
confirm the observation of John Quincy Adams, that the constitution
was extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant people.”

No wonder that an active minority remained full of hostility to
the new order of things, whose cries in behalf of what they called
their lost liberties filled the public car for a whole generation.
Threats were made to break the Union before the close of the last
century, and a political parly came into being, almost simultaneously
with the constitution, claiming, under and by virtue of the instru-
ment itself, the right to nullify any act of Congress which might be
considered to infringe any right of a State. If any such right
existed it necessarily included the right of secession as a last resort.
This party took the name of BepubUcan, from its attachment to the
principles of the French Bevolution. It sought to stigmatize its
opponents as monarchists, but the title did not adhere. The name
Federalist was that by which it was known to contemporaries and is
known to history. The leader of the Bepublican party of that day
was Thomas Jefierson, third President of the United States. Mr.
Jefferson was the American minister to France at the time the
constitution was framed. He wrote a long letter to Mr. Madison,
signifying his general approval of the instrument, but foreshadowing

(1) A recent work by a French author ('* Lea ftate-Unis Contemporains,” par Claudio
Jannet, Faria, 1876), which brings forward a stock of half-truths really too formidable
for criticism, says (p. 31) that Virginia, New York, and Bhode Idan^ in their ratifi-
cations, expressly reserv^ the right to withdraw !

THE AMEBICAH GEETENABT.

500

tlie course he subsequently took in his interpretation of it. He said :
** I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government ; it is
always oppressive ; it places the governors indeed more at their ease,
but at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts
(Shay’s Eebellion) has given more alarm than I think it should have
done. Calculate that one rebelhon in thirteen States in the course
of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No
country should be so long rnthout one.^* Somewhat later Mr. Jefferson
clothed his notions of an ideal Union in these words : An impotent
general government is the condition precedent of liberty.”

Mr. Jefferson was a Hadical and a passionate admirer of the
French Revolution. He believed that liberty and an efficient central
government were incompatible with each other. In this belief he
differed from his political associate and successor, Madison, who held
that too much weakness in the central government would bo as
dangerous to liberty, through its tendency to license and consequent
reaction, as too much strength. Wo are perhaps not far enough
removed even yet from the agitations which they set on foot to form
a perfectly unprejudiced judgment of their characters and work, but
no one will deny that both contributed largely to their country’s
cause, and both exhibited at times the qualities of true statesman-
ship. Madison’s, however, was less mixed with personal interest
than Jefferson’s, and his patriotism was of a purer, or at all events a
less partisan, type. He was lacking in the power of will and con-
tinuity which distinguished Jefferson, and was led by the latter into
errors which completely stultified him afterwards, but which he
would most likely have escaped if left to his own cooler judgment.
Mr. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document
which stamps him as a master of the English tongue, and proves, as
Mr. Bancroft observes in the concluding chapter of his History, that
“ he was able with instinctive perception to read the soul of the
nation.” He suggested the prohibition of slavery in all the jiew
territories (to take effect after the year 1800), and drafted an ordi-
nance to that effect three years before the famous ordinance of 1787,
prohibiting it in the north-west territory, was passed. He was at
heart an anti-slavery man, and he sincerely desired the abolition of
the institution in his native State, but was always careful to avoid
offending the Virginia slave-holders by untimely expressions of his
views. He conceived and accomplished the purchase of Louisiana,
thus securing the mouth of the Mississippi and an immense torritoiy
on the west bank of that river. On the other hand, he was an
extreme partisan and extremely ambitious, and he did not scruple to
emjdoy the arts of the demagogue to obtain a party advantage. He
was in fact a consummate politician, and the best party leader of his
time. In the way of backbiting he had few equ^s. His letter to

THE AMERICAN CENTENARY.

601

Washington, accusing Hamilton of the purpose and desire to esta-
blish a monarchical government, and his letter to Mazzei, accusing
Washington of the same thing in substance, are couched in terms
which compel us to think that, at the time they were written, he
really believed his own preposterous statements. They serve to
show a narrowness or crookedness of vision of which there are many
other examples in his career. Washington was convinced that
Jefferson had intrigued against him while yet a member of his
cabinet, and the intercourse of the two became subsequently of a
ceremonious character, ^'llis [Jefferson’s] mode of thought was a
mixture of about equal parts of dialectical acuteness, and of the
fanaticism of superficiality, as shortsighted as it was daring.”^
Finally, the principles of federal government, of which he became
the champion and expounder, were fundamentally wrong, and have
been productive of untold mischief. Those principles were embodied
in the resolutions passed by the legislatures of Kentucky and
Virginia in the year 1798, which will be examined hereafter.

Opposed to Jefferson’s theory of government and of the constitu-
tion, in all its parts, was the master-spirit of Washington’s first
cabinet, Alexander Hamilton, of New York. Born in the West
Indies, of mixed Scotch and French Huguenot blood, he combined
in the highest degree the perseverance and acumen of the one race
with the versatility of the other. Sent to New York to be educated,
he entered Columbia College, and was pursuing his studies there,
when the differences between the colonies and the mother-country
became sufficiently pronounced to engage the earnest thought of all
classes. At the age of seventeen ho produced a scries of essays
on the Rights of the Colonics, which attracted general attention.

There arc displayed in these papers,” says a competent authority,
“ a power of reasoning and sarcasm, a knowledge of the principles of
government and of the English constitution, and a grasp of the
merits of the whole controversy, that would have done honour to any
man at any age, and in a youth of seventeen arc wonderfiil.” *

About the same time he gave indications, in a pubUc speech at
Boston, of that rare eloquence which in after years enabled him to
sway public assemblages and to bring hard-headed and hostile legis-
lative bodies to his way of thinking in spite of themselves. At the
age of nineteen he entered the patriot army as Captain of Artillery,
and after a short service in this capacity was chosen by General
Washington as his confidential aidc-de-camp ; with him he remained
till near the close of the war. When Washington was elected
President he called Hamilton again to his councils and tendered him

(1) Von Holst, p. 160.

(2) Hist. Constitution of the U.S., by Qeo. Ticknor Curtis. «

502

THE AHEBICAN GENTENABT.

ihe post of cliief importance afid chief difficulty, that of Secretary of
the Treasury, in which he well earned the felicitous encomium pro-
nounced upon him, a generation later, by Daniel Webster : He
smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of
reyenue g^ushed forth ; he touched the dead corpse of the public
credit, and it sprang upon its feet.” To his exertions and to
Madison’s in about equal measure had the country been indebted for
the ratification of the constitution. To his sagacity mainly is it
due that the new government was not strangled in its infancy.
With untiring industry, unerring foresight, and sleepless vigilance,
he frustrated the efforts of the party of disintegration of his day.
Against his generalship numbers availed nothing, nor did the ingra-
ti^de and insubordination of his own party ever daunt him. He
saw clearly the object to be attained, and when his own friends
deserted 1dm he made use of his enemies to accomplish his ends,
which were always his country’s. The more superficial parts of
Jefferson were no match for his active and clairvoyant genius. One
by one he laid the timbers of a stable, self-sustaining, self-propelling
government, and at last he sealed his devotion to his principles with
his blood ; for not even the death of Lincoln was more signally due
to his faithfulness to the Union cause, than that of Hamilton when
he exposed his body to the pistol shot of Aaron Burr. Hamilton
believed that a nation could be made out of the political debris that
the revolutionary war had left. That those jealous and discordant
materials did not constitute a nation he was perfectly well aware.
He had the courage and capacity to undertake the task ; but he
looked too far into the future to be a successful politician. Hence,
although he carried his point in settling the character of the new
government, he lost the prizes of statesmanship, and Jefferson
gained them.

President Washington’s cabinet was constructed on the plan of
attempting to harmonize parties — ^a plan of government which,
although erroneous in general, was not ill adapted to the circum-
stances of the time. Both Jefferson and Hamilton had places in it.
But Washington’s confidence was given in such marked degree to
the latter that the former eventually retired in disgust, acknow-
ledging that he had been led by his rival, in one instance at least,
to support a measure intended to strengthen the Government, and
that he considered it the greatest mistake of his life.

The principal measures proposed by Hamilton, having for their
object the creation of an efficient central government, and the per-
petuation of the Union, were the funding bill (including in that
phrase the bill for the assumption of the State debts), the excise
law and the first National Bank charter. Although nothing was
more absolutely necessary to the prosperity of the Union than

THE AHEBIGAK GEKTENABT.

608

Hamilton’s funding bill, or some kindred measure for restoring the
pubUc credit; although no argument had been more effective in call-
ing the Philadelphia Convention together than the destruction of
that credit, the measure was opposed by the Anti-Federalists on the
express ground that it would tend to strengthen the Union and
thereby weaken by comparison the sovereignty of the States. Even
Mr. Madison opposed it upon this ground. The bill was^ defeated
upon its first introduction in the House, but Hamilton rallied his
forces a second time and carried his point by a piece of ** log-roll-
ing.” The representatives of Maryland and Virginia desired to have
the National capital located on the banks of the Potomac Biver.
Hamilton persuaded enough of his friends to vote for this change of
the seat of Government to carry it through, and in return secured
enough votes to pass the funding bill. But he was shocked at the
character of the opposition he had encountered, and he recorded his
opinion of it by saying : It is the first symptom of a spirit which
must be killed, or it will kill the constitution of the United States ”
— a saying which waited three quarters of a century for its entire
fulfilment, but which vindicated itself signally in each succeeding
decade.

The bill for an excise on distilled spirits was brought forward for
the double purpose of obtaining means to meet the requirements of
the funding act, and of strengthening the Union by seizing a source
of revenue which might otherwise have been appropriated by the
States. The State-rights party saw the latter point a moment too
late, and although the bill had become a law they began with one
accord to oppose its enforcement, and when an insurrection sprang
up in "Western Pennsylvania to defeat the collection of the tax, they
managed to delay, for the space of three years, the employment of
force to put it down. This was the earliest act of outright nullifica-
tion that had been witnessed since tho adoption of the constitution.
Though not sanctioned by the authority of Pennsylvania or any
other State, it enlisted the sympathies and indirect aid of the entire
opposition party. When Hamilton at last persuaded Washington
to take decisive steps by military force to put down the insurgents,
a perfect storm of vilification rained upon him. Fifteen thousand
militia were called for and sent into camp under Washington’s
personal supervision. Hamilton himself marched with them to the
scene of the disturbances, apprehensive to the very last that they
might throw down their arms and return home. The insurgents
were extremely valiant when they had to deal only with tax-collectors,
sheriffs, and a dozen or more soldiers stationed at an old wooden fort,
but when the army of coercion arrived the champions of the divine
right of distillation were nowhere to be found in any organized
force. The leaders, conspicuous among whom was Albert Gallatin,

^4

THE AHEBICAX CENTENARY.

were fain to sue for pardon on any terms that would save their
necks, and their deluded followers took refuge in their own native
obscurity. It was an important victory to Hamilton and his party,
for it was the first forcible assertion of the national authority over
local insubordiDation. Even as late as 1861 the example had not
lost its potency. ‘‘Did not Washington put down the whisky
rebellion in 1794 ? exclaimed the Union orators and newspapers
when the slaveholders’ rebellion commenced. Technically, the two
cases were not parallel, but for practical purposes they were suffi-
ciently so.

The events which called forth the famous “ Besolutions of ’98 ”
were intimately connected with the French Bevolution. This great
social upheaval was welcomed with almost universal acclaim in
America, but as it progressed from wholesome reform to rapine and
terror, the zeal of the Federalists cooled toward their republican
brothers on the other side of the water. Washington himself was
determined that, whatever might be the sympathies of the people,
the country should not be embroiled in the struggle during his
Presidency. The French authorities were determined that it should
be so embroiled, calculating that whenever a breach of neutrality
should occur, the prevailing republican sj^mpathy and the memories
of the late war would infallibly bring the United States to their side.
In this they might have succeeded, but for the intolerable insolence
of their two ministers, Genet and Adct, both of whom affected to
hold relations with “ the people ” of the United States as distinguished
from the Government; Genet going so far as to treat the country as
a French colony, fitting out privateers, enlisting troops, and issuing
commissions to officers on American soil. There is too much reason
to believe that Genet was secretly encouraged in this course by
Jefferson, who was'«jRien Secretary of State. Although the French
Directory were compelled to recall Genet, their subsequent acts showed
that they approved his proceedings. Bent upon forcing Washington
out of his position of neutrality, they organized a political campaign
in the United States through pamphlets, newspapers, handbills,
clubs, and inflammatory appeals to the memories of ’76. They
insulted Washington in every possible way, even insinuating, in a
formal address to Minister Monroe, that he (Washington) was aim-
ing to lead the people of the Union “ back to their former slavery.”
If they had confined themselves to words, they might have carried
their point so far as to bring the people over to their side, and even-
tually the Government also. But their military successes had embol-
dened them to make an application of force as well as of persuasion,
and by seizing and confiscating a number of American vessels,
freighted in whole or in part with British goods, in violation of Ihe
express provisions of a treaty, they speedily paralysed the influence

THE AMEBICAK CENTENABT.

505

of their best friends in America. Negotiations on the subject
of the seizure of vessels grew exasperating. Minister Pinckney was
ordered out of France, and even threatened with imprisonment under
the French alien law. When finally Talleyrand attempted to impose
a heavy fine upon the United States, and demanded in addition
thereto a personal gratuity of twelve hundred thousand livres for the
Directory and ministers, as conditions of restoring a good under-
standing, the nation resolutely began preparations for war. s.

Washington was again invested with the chief command, John
Adams having succeeded bim as President, and Hamilton again
became his first lieutenant in the field. While the people were in
daily expectation of the opening of hostilities, the Republicans being
thoroughly cowed, and Jefferson very despondent, a couple of laws
were passed by Congress (to continue in operation two and three
years respectively) to rid the country of the emissaries of the French
Government, and to curb the licentiousness of the French sympa-
thising press, clubs, associations, &c. These are known to history as
the alien and sedition laws. They were approved by Washington
and Patrick Henry, as well as by President Adams. Hamilton did not
doubt their constitutionality, but thought them ‘‘ highly exception-
able,” as tending to tyranny and likely to consolidate and strengthen
the opposition to the Government, rather than to intimidate and
weaken In the light of the present day the alien and sedition
laws find no defenders ; but it is a fact not generally remembered that
the opposition of the Republican party of the last century to these
measures was based, not upon the infringement of liberty, but the
infringement of State rights embodied in them.^ It was their view,
that if any alien or sedition laws were required, they should be passed
by the State legislatures, and not by Congress.^ It is only thus that
we can understand the counter-measures proposed by Jefferson — ^the
famous ‘‘ resolutions of ’98.” The alien and sedition laws, although
not intended to promote party ends, could not fail to produce effects
upon parties, since they would actually suppress a portion of the
machinery by which the opposition saw fit to conduct their political
campaigns. Heretofore the opposition had confined themselves to
fitful and uncertain objections to particular measures of the Govern-
ment, but they had had no rallying point, and no well-defined prin-
ciples as to home politics. Sympathy with republican France could
not be expected to last for ever, nor could it be depended on even
now, when subjected to the strains put upon it by TaUcyrand, Genet,
and Adet. The time had come, in Jefferson’s view, to establish a
rallying point, and to fix some principles. He believed that the

(1) Professor Yon Holst does not make this point dear. The resolutions of ’9S
would not he logical if directed merely to the vindication of freedom of speech and of
the press.

VOL. XX. N.S.

M M

606

THE AMEBIGAN CENTEiNARY.

successive invasions of State sovereignty had reached a crisis in the
alien and sedition laws^ and that now, or never, a determined resist-
ance must be made. Hence the resolutions of ’98.

Two sets of resolutions, differing somewhat in phraseology, were
passed, the one by the legislature of Virginia, and the other by that
of Kentucky. Those of Kentucky were the more pointed and
outspoken of the two, but they were alike in substance, and had a
common origin. Those of Virginia were drawn up by Madison at
Jefferson’s request, and were passed by the legislature of that State,
December 21, 1798. The}^ declare that the powers of the federal
government result from a compact to which the States are parties,
to be construed by the plain sense and intention of the eonstitution,
and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of
other powers not granted by the said compact, the States which arc
parties thereto ‘‘ have the right and are in duty hound to interpose for
arresting the progress of the eyiL, and for maintaining within their
respective limits the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to
them.” The Kentucky resolutions recite that the constitution was
a compact, to which each State was an integral party ; that the
general government was not the sole judge of the powers delegated
to itself, but that as in all other cases of compact among parties
having no common judge, each party had an equal right to judge
for itself, as well of the infraction as of the mode and manner of
redress. Also that the several States which formed the constitution,
“ being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to
judge of the infraction, and that a mdlification by these sovereignties
of all unauthorised acts done under colour of that instrument is the
rightful remedy.” Two copies of the Kentucky resolutions in the
handwriting of Jefferson, varying slightly in language but not in
idea, were found among his papers after his death, and there is
abundant historical evidence apart from this, that ho was the author
of both sets, and that he persuaded Mr. Madison to prepuce them
for the legislature of Virginia, and Colonel Nicholas to introduce
them in that of Kentucky. It appears, therefore, that Mr. Calhoun
was no more the author of the doctrine of nullification than Jeffer-
son Davis was. Both drew their inspiration from the so-called
republican party of the last century, and appealed to some of the
most venerated names in American history for their justification.
It should be kept in mind that this doctrine was not an assertion of
its right of revolution, but of a constitutional right to resist consti-
tuted authority.

The Federalists remained in power twelve years, but they wore
not really a majority of the people at any time. The universal con-
fidence reposed in Washington, the superior statesmanship of the
Federalist leaders, the wealth, education, and social position of their

THE AMERIGAH CENTEHAKY.

607

followers, and tlie extravagant and unprincipled demands of the ^
French Directory, had together outweighed the popular leaning
toward France, and the still lively animosity toward Great Britain.
But this leaning and this animosity were constant quantities, while
the opposing forces were variable. Washington had retired to
private life, and his successor, John Adams, had picked a personal
quarrel with Hamilton, and a public one with the bulk of his party,
by sending a new mission to France before the insults of Talleyrand
had been atoned or apologised for. This step on the part of Mr.
Adams has been variously accounted for ; but supposing it to have
been in the highest degree patriotic, it is certain that it was taken
without consulting any member of his cabinet or any person entitled
to be called a leader of the party. Consequently, the merits of the
step in* a diplomatic and international point of view, however great
they may have been, were, in a party point of view, completely frus-
trated by the manner of taking it. Many Federalists believed that
Adams had gone over to the Itcpublicans. The Republicans them-
selves, who were still greatly dispirited, notwithstanding some local
gains they had made in the South through the unpopularity of the
alien and sedition laws, plucked up courage wonderfully, chiiming
that they had been right all the time in their policy of kissing the
hand that smote them. The result was, that Mr. Adams failed of a
re-election. Jellerson and Burr (Republicans), received a tie vote
in the electoral college, and the election was thrown into the House
of Representatives, where neither of them could get a clear majority
without the help of the Federalists.

The mass of the Republican voters intended that Jefferson should
be President and Burr Vice-President ; but under the provisions of
the Constitution at that time each Presidential elector voted for two
persons, the one receiving the highest number of votes to be Presi-
dent, and the one receiving the next highest to be Vice-President.'
In case of a tie, the House of Representatives was required to choose
the President, each State having one vote, and a majority of the
States being requisite to a choice. In order to worry the Republicans
and to spite Jefferson, a portion of the Federalists conceived the idea
of electing Burr President. There were now sixteen States in the
Union, of which Jefferson and Burr could count on six each, leaving
four in the control of the Federalists. When Hamilton, who had
meanwhile retired to private life, learned of the intrigue between
Burr and the Federalists, he threw his whole influeuce in favour of
Jefferson. He told his friends that if there was apy man in the
world whom he ought to hate that man was Jefferson, but that Burr
was at heart a Catiline, bent upon ruling the country by uniting
the scoundrels of all parties, and that upon every virtuous and
prudent calculation Jefferson was to be preferre^.” Li Burr he saw

HM 2

508

THE AMERICAN CENTENARY.

the enemy of his country, and in Jefferson only his own enemy.
Exactly how far his counsels were instrumental in bringing about
the defeat of Surr is not known, but considering his recognised
position as the most trusted leader of his party, and considering also
the very narrow escape which Jefferson had, we must conclude that
they were very important if not decisive.^ While the balloting was
going on in the House some of the Federalists proposed to make the
dead-lock permanent, as they had the power to do, and choose a
presiding officer of the Senate, vesting the executive power in him
by statute until a President should bo lawfully chosen. Even
Mr. Adams thought this was feasible, and that the people would be
as well satisfied with it as with the election of either Burr or Jefferson.
But Jefferson took care to notify them that on the day such a statute
should be passed, the middle States would arm and overthrow a
government so constituted. In point of fact steps were taken to
make good this threat. The building of an armoury at Kfehmond,
which had been commenced during the alien- nnd-sodition-law excite-
ment, was recommenced, and a plan set on foot to seize the Govern-
ment arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The Federalists were scared out of
their project, which was clearly unconstitutional and revolutionary.

Although the Federalists had gone out of power never to return,
their policy had been impressed on the new Government so firmly
that their successful opponents made no attempt to undo their work.
While labouring to defeat Burr, Hamilton predicted that Jefferson,
once in power, would not disturb the measures which had been
adopted to strengthen the Government. In point of fact, he was
soon compelled to use stronger measures than the Federalists had
ever employed. The Federalists, on the other hand, began to con-
strue the constitution with the aid of Jefferson’s dictionary. The
proposed purchase of Louisiana alarmed the New England States.
They apprehended that the addition of this extensive dominion would
give the South a perpetual preponderance in the Union anir control
of the Government. There was no clause in the constitution
expressly conferring upon Congress the power to acquire foreign
territory. They became great sticklers for “strict construction.”
Some of them claimed that a constitutional amendment was neces-
sary ; while others, reverting to the resolutions of ’98, declared that
since the constitution was a compact, in the nature of a partnership,
it was impossible to take in new partners without the consent of all

(1) If we may credit the statement of Burr's biographer (Parton), Jefferson's sub-
sequent behaviour presented a very sorry contrast to this example of magnanimily on
the part of his rival. When, according to this authority, Hamilton’s assassin arrived
in Waidiington City after the fatal encounter, Jefferson received him with marks of
attention, and gave him at least one and probably two appointments to important
offices foT" his (Barr's) friends— the secretaryship and governorship of Louisiana
Territory.

THE AHEBICAN GEITTEKABT.

509

the old ones^ and that the taking in of a new one without such con-
sent would release the old ones. The Republicans contended that
the power to acquire territory was one of the necessary attributes of
sovereignty, inherent in every government, whatever its name or
character. Jefferson himself could not abandon all the theories ho
had been elaborating these twelve years for the confusion of his
enemies and the admiration of posterity. Nor could he let the
opportunity to acquire Louisiana slip by. So he acknowledged that
the step he had determined to take was unconstitutional, and pro-
ceeded forthwith to take it. The acquisition of Louisiana served to
strengthen the Government, not only by the possession of the mouth
of the Mississippi, but by committing to the doctrine of “ constructive
powers ” the only party that had up to this time denied it.

The Federalists, however, soon found new occasions to change
ground with their adversaries. The British orders in council, and
the Berlin and Milan decrees of Napoleon, fell with great severity
on American commerce. Jefferson was opposed on the score of
principle to a war with France, and on the score of interest to a war
with England. As a measure of retaliation he recommended an
embargo on American commerce. In this he was at hrst sustained
by the country with singular unanimity, even John Quincy Adams
voting for the measure. But the weight of the blow fell upon New
England with tenfold greater severity than upon Old England.
Indeed it was scarcelj^ noticed in the latter country, while in the
former it inflicted greater injury than the orders in council and the
decrees of Napoleon combined. Opposition to the embargo became
very decided. It worked its way into New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. But Jefferson and his
party were so convinced that the deprivation of American products
would eventually bring England to terms, that they adhered to it
with the utmost tenacity. The war of words was at its height
when John Quincy Adams whispered io Jefferson that a combination
had been formed in the North having for its object a disruption of
the Union, and Jefferson was so much alarmed by it that he recom-
mended a repeal of the embargo and a war with England in its
stead. How far Mr. Adams was justified in saying that the Union
was in danger in consequence of the embargo is still a matter of
dispute. When his statement to Jefferson leaked out, some fifteen
years later, Mr. Adams was called upon by thirteen eminent citizens
of Massachusetts to give a full and precise account of the facts and
evidence constituting the foundation of so injurious a charge. In
replying to this request, Mr. Adams went back to the acquisition of
Louisiana in 180c3, five years earlier than the embargo, and said that
a 'plan had been formed then, by certain Federalist leaders, to dis-
solve the Union, and that it had gone so far as to fix upon a military

510 fHE AlOSBIGAN GENIENABT.

eommander to cany it into execution ; that his knowledge of it
alienated him from the secret councils of the party ; that the con*
epiracy of 1808 which he communicated to Mr. Jefferson was a
continuance and reTival of the proposed revolt against the Louisiana
purchase, for which the public exasperation against the embargo
seemed to furnish a new opportunity ; and finally that a sense of
solemn duty might at some future day require him to disclose the
evidence in his possession for these grave allegations, but that the
selection of the day for such disclosure, whether in his own lifetime
or later, must remain in his own judgment. Nearly thirty years
have elapsed since Mr. Adams’s death, but the disclosure has not yet
been made. The absence of any motive for misrepresentation, no
less than his elevated character and his ample sources of information,
must convince us that there was some substantial ground for his
statements. Moreover, 3Ir. Hamilton was so keenly alive to the
dangers of the plot in 1803 and 1804 that, in his efforts to frustrate
it, he became involved in the controversy with Burr, which ended
in the fatal duel between them.

Jefferson’s proposed war with England was voted down by n
decisive majority in Congress. Madison succeeded him os Pre-
sident, and sought to secure the exemption of American shipping
from the harsh and unjustifiable measures of the belligerents in
Europe by negotiation. Three years of indefatigable letter writing,
mingled with threats of war in the American Congress and entreaties
for peace among British manufacturers, resulted in the revocation of
both the Berlin and 3Iilan decrees and the orders in council. But
war with England had been declared two monthssbefore the news of
the revocation was received. Hostilities had not actually commenced,
and a hope was entertained among the commercial classes of the
North that the repeal of the obnoxious orders would avert bloodshed.
But a war party had grown up in Congress under the spur of con-
tinued provocations, led by Clay and Calhoun, fired with th^idea of
conquering and annexing Canada, and reaping glory and political
capital from that undertaking. The so-called right of search and the
impressment of seamen on board American vessels, claimed and exer-
cised by Great Britain, were indeed a sore grievance, sufficient to
have justified a war without any other causes of difference, but as
this was not the cause of the war-preparations in the first place, and
as it was not clear that it might not have been removed by negotia-
tion, and as it was wholly ignored in the subsequent treaty of Ghent,
we are constrained to believe that the real reason for rejecting the
tardy and ungracious concessions offered by Lord Castlereagh was
something else. Whatever may have been the motives of the junta
tibat overcame Mr. Madison’s strong aversion to war, the two coun-
tries soon came to blows. As the war was without definite aim on

the AMEBIOAK CENTEHAET. oil

either side, so was it without definite result. The New England
States, which wero the principal sufferers from it, tacitly resolved to
contribute nothing to it beyond what the letter of the law demanded.
The anti-war party soon acquired a majority in the legislatures of
New York and New Jersey, and at times carried the elections in
Delaware and Maryland. The war-party became greatly exasperated
at their want of success in the field, which they attributed, with con-
siderable justice, to a lack of energy on the part of those who
believed that the conflict was unnecessary, and therefore wrong. A
new and more stringent embargo was enacted, as much for the pur-
pose of punishing the New England States as of annoying the enemy,
whereupon the Massachusetts legislature, taking the ideas and bor-
rowing, in part, the language of the resolutions of ’98, used these
memorable words : ** We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign, and
independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal
corporation, vrithout power to protect its people and defend them from
oppression from whatever quarter it comes. When the national
compact is violated and the citizens of the State are oppressed by
cruel and unauthorized law, this legislature is donnd to interpose its
power and wrest from the oppressor his victim.”

Here was the doctrine of State sovereignty in full measure. It
>vas followed by the refusal of Massachusetts, and of Connecticut
also, to allow Federal officers to take command of their militia, and
by the call for the Hartford Convention. This convention was stig-
matised as a hotbed of treason by the party in power, and is not con-
sidered at the present time a desirable place to trace one’s political
lineage back to.. But it never ^vent beyond the fundamental prin-
ciples of DemocTatic-Ilcpublican faith, as written by Jefferson and
Madison themselves. Both parties had, for the time being, changed
coats — the Federalists asserting State sovereignty, and their opponents
national sovereignty. Three of the New England States were repre-
sented in tho Hartford Convention by regular delegates, and the
other two by irrcgidar ones. But it led to no result except to bring
its participants under a load of obloquy — ^negotiations for peace
having been instituted before it concluded its sittings. It recom-
mended to tho States represented the adoption of measures to protect
their citizens against forcible drafts, conscriptions, or impressments
not authorized by the constitution — an ominous proceeding if the
States w’ere to judge for themselves of tho constitutionality of such
drafts and conscriptions. Its other recommendations were technically
unobjectionable, ulthougli the spirit governing the whole was a
defensive league bctw'een the New England States. These recom-
mendations wero formally accepted by Massachusetts and Connecti-
cut, and that W'as os far as tho project over got. The conclusion of
peace rendered it nugator}% and perhaps saved Mr. Madison a task

612

THE AHEBIGAN CENTENABT.

lie was by lio means equal to — ^tbat of combatting a rebellion founded
upon tbe resolutions of ’98.

From this time forward there has never been in the North any
important assertion of the right of a State to nullify an act of
Congress. Some decisions were made in Northern State courts over-
ruling the fugitive slave law, on the ground that it was an infringe-
ment of State jurisdiction^ but when these decisions were overruled
by the United States Supreme Court, the judgments of the latter
tribunal were always acquiesced in. Two petitions from the North
asking for a peaceable dissolution of the Union, presented in Con-
gress by John Quincy Adams and Joshua R. Oiddings, in the year
1842, but disavowed by those gentlemen, caused great commotion in
the House of Representatives ; but even the small consequence that
could justly be attached to them, was not derived from the doctrine
of State sovereignty or from the principles embodied in the
resolutions of ’98. These principles henceforward found their
home exclusively in the South, where they had been first formulated,
and where they dovetailed with slavery in so firm a bond that the
one could not be destroyed without shattering the other also.

The agitation in the South against the Protective Tariff of 1828
was intimately connected with the slavery question. The North
was gaining rapidly in wealth, population, and political importance,
notwithstanding the Louisiana purchase, which had so greatly
alarmed the New England Federalists thirty years before. The
South was lagging behind her unfettered rival, and becoming more
and more jealous and discontented every year, lllindod by her
« peculiar institution,” she refused to sec in it apy cause for her
backwardness in material prosperity, and sought to find reasons for
it in the legislation of the country. The tariff hud been growing
more and more protective for several years, fulfilling the prediction
of those who had declared in the beginning that, no amount of pro-
tection would be satisfactory to the protected classes more thaiT a few
years, and that a stiffer line would be called fur soon. The tariff of
1828 was the stiffest that had ever been called for. The hostility of
the planting States to this measure, however, was not merely opposi-
tion to a bad fiscal policy, but was an outburst of anger at the badge
of inferiority which the census-taker was putting on them every ten
years, which they ascribed, honestly i)erhap8, to the tariff. Shortly
after the inauguration of President Jackson, the opposition to the
tariff in South Carolina took a very decided attitude. In the
summer of 1832, Mr. Calhoun, one of the senators of that State,
published an address ** On the Relations of the States and Federal
Government.” He commenced by saying that the question of those
relations was not one of recent origin, but that, from the commence-
ment of the government, it had divided public sentiment. He then

THE AMERIGAH CENTENAEY.

613

proceeded to plant himself on the Virginia resolutions of 1798, say-
ing that ** the right of interposition thus solemnly asserted by the
State of Virginia, be it called as it may — State right, ye^), nullifica-
tion, or by any other name — I conceive to be the fundamental prin-
ciple of our system, resting upon facts historically as certain as our
revolution itself, and deductions as simple and as demonstrative as
that of any political or moral truth whatever.” On the 24th of
November following, the Convention of South Carolina passed aii
ordinance declaring the tariff law null and void, and making it
unlawful for the officers of the general government to collect any
duties in that State. If force should be employed to collect such
duties. South Carolina would consider herself absolved from all alle-
giance to the Union, and would proceed at once to organize a separate
government.

President Jackson replied by sending a message to Congress,
affirming that the constitution of the United States was a government
and not a eompociy that the language of the instrument itself declaring
that it, and the laws, and treaties made in pursuance of it, should be
the snpmne hue of iho huul^ and that all State courts should be bound
by it, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the con-
trary notwithstanding, excluded the idea that a State could declare
and treat such supreme law us a nullity. Ilis argument, a very able
one, was pointedly opposed to the resolutions of ^98. The Demo-
cratic party of the present day claims descent in the direct line from
frefferson and Jackson, and the claim is in one sense true, but not at
all valuable ; for if ever there were two men holding opinions more
diametrically opposed to each other as to the vital principles of the
constitution and government of their country, history has not men-
tioned them. Nevertheless, Jackson was not anxious to press the
controversy with South Carolina to a bloody issue. He recommended
the passage of a new law to enforce the collection of duties in South
Carolina, but at the same time he recommended a reduction of the
duties. If the duties had not been reduced it is probable that he
would have brought, the State into obedience by military force,
because he was a soldier, and he believed in the employment of force.
Mr. Clay even accused him of a desire to gratify his passions by
spilling the blood of his enemies in South Carolina ; but there is the
best evidence that he wished to avoid that necessity. Mr. Clay,
himself the champion of the tariff, was the first to back down.
He had been eager for a war with England when there was no
substantial cause for it, and now he was equally anxious to avoid a
war for which there was abundant cause. Through his influence
the tariff of 1828 was reduced one-half, the reductions extending
over a series of years by a sliding scale — a measure the wisdom of
whioh would be conceded if it had not been extorted under a threat.

514

THE AMEEICAK CENTENAET.

The Souih Oorolina Convention was reassembled, and the nullifying
ordinance repealed on the express ground that the tariff had been
modified to^eet the views of the nullifiers. The doctrine of State
sovereignty, nullification, or secession — all names for the same
thing — ^received enormous impetus and strength from tho temporary
triumph achieved for it in 1832, and the slave power incorporated it
still more strongly into their political creed, and enlarged it year by
year, till it came to include the right to curry slaves into free terri-
tory, and hold them there against the will of the majority.

It would bo impossible within the limits of this article to touch
upon all the manifestations of the struggle between the opposing
ideas of State and national sovereignty prior to the death-grapple
between them, which commenced in 1861, and ended in 1863 in the
complete demolition of the doctrines laid down in the resolutions of
^98. Strongly convinced as the writer is that the language of the
constitution, as originally framed and ratified, lodged the sovereign
power in the national government exclusively, it is apparent that
nothing short of superior force could ever have settled tho dispute
after it became complicated with the pecuniary interests and bitter
pasfflons of slavery. It is likewise apparent that until the question
was decided the United States could not logically be counted a nation.
While one- half, or nearly one-half, of the people maintained and
believed that the general government was a mere agency, or power
of attorney, revocable at pleasure, and wliile they had power to give
effect to such views, the nationality existed only in the vain imagin-
ings of those who held the contrary opinion. The birth of tho
nation, therefore, does not really date from the 4th of July, 177(5,
but from the day whereon the theories of Thomas Jefferson were
crushed by force and arms. Mr. Jefferson's desire for a rebellion
oftener than once in a century and a half has been gratified beyond
his most sanguine expectations. Considering the state of the world
at the time he played his part in it, we iicvd not blame hinTfor tho
views he held, but in awarding the palm of statesmanship, which is the
gift of seeing in advance how institutions will operate upon society,
we must pi^s him by and place it on the brow of his great rival.

Although it may now bo said that a dual sovereignty has been
proven by the strongest of all arguments to bo a self-contradiction
and an impossibility. Professor Yon Holst observes that the idea
still clings after the thing itself has vanished. This is true, for ** he
who’s convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.” How
extenidvely the old idea prevails in men’s bosoms cannot be ascer-
tained, but something may be inferred from the action of the
|Nditical party that formerly supported and maintained it. The
Federalist pi^y had been ground to powder, and ceased to exist,
during the administration of James Monroe, whose second election

THE AMEBICAK GENTEEABY.

515

to the Presidency was accomplished without opposition. For want
of opposition, the Democratic-Republican party broke into four
fragments in the election of 1824 without any essential difference of
principles ; and no candidate receiving a majority of the electoral
votes, John Quincy Adams was chosen President by the House of
Representatives. A few years later, the fragments crystallised into
the Democratic party under the leadership of General Jackson ; and
the National Republican party under that of Adams and Clay. The
latter organisation was soon afterwards merged, with sundry deser-
tions from the Jackson ranks, in the American Whig party, which
survived till 1856, when it succumbed to the exigencies of the
slavery question, and gave way to the existing Republican party.
In 1852, the Democratic party for the first time took cognizance of
the slavery question in its national platform, and in close juxta-
position declared the principles laid down in the Kentucky and
Virginia resolutions of 1798 and Mr. Madison’s report thereon
to be one of the main foundations of its political creed. This
declaration was repeated in the party platform of 1856. In
1860 the Democratic party divided in sunder, and both fragments
reaffirmed the platform of 1856. In 1864, the war being in
progress, the resolutions of ’98 were prudently omitted. In 1868
the party declartMi that the right of regulating the suffrage belonged
to the several States, and that any attempt by Congress to interfere
with it would, if sanctioned by the people, “ end in a single, cen-
tralised, consolidated government, in which the separate existence of
the States will be entirely absorbed, and an unqualified de^tism be
established in jdace of a: federal union of co-equal States.” Two
years later the suffrage was reguhited in all the States by an amend-
ment of the constitution. The Democratic party, in its platform of
the present year, declares its devotion to the constitution of the
United States, with iU amenthnents^ universally accepted as a final
settlement of the controversy that engendered the civil war.” The old
idea, however, timidly shows its head in another paragraph, where it
is declared that reform is necessary to save the Union from the
dangers of a “corrupt centralism,” the voter being left to infer
vaguely whether the dangers arc due most to corruption or to cen-
tralism. This is the attenuated skeleton of the resolutions of ’98.
Nevertheless a large body of opinion remains, under the influence of
party bios or curly training, favourable to the idea of State sovereignty
co-existing with national sovereignty, and this is not confined wholly
to the Democratic party. A certain vagueness even pervades the
Republican party, from whose midst we not infrequently hear that
the States are sovereign “ within their sphere ” — the sphere being as
undefined as the spheres assigned for our future abode in the text-
books of modem spiritualism. The full extent of the defeat suffered

516

the AUEBICIN CENXENABY.

by file State rights party in the late war is only half understood by
eithw Tictors or vanquished. The ofRcial seal of the State of Illinois
is stQl inscribed with tho motto “ State sovereignty, national Union ”
— a phrase whose suggestions convey no idea of national sovereignty
whatever. Yet the State of Illinois has been under the control of
the Bepubhean party during sixtemi years. Most of the State con-
stitutions contain clauses providing for the pimishmeut of treason
against the State. These provisions are incongruous with existing
&ct^ for it is quite conceivable that a citizen might be hanged for
treason against a State, and his judges and executioners hanged for
treason against the United States. All the apparatus for such a
solecism was in readiness in South Carolina in the year 1832.

Notwithstanding the more or less confusion in the public mind on
the subject of State rirtmi national sovereignty, State sovereignty now
goes to the wall in every practical conflict. Nor will its entire dis-
appearance be followed by the “ unqnalifled despotism ” apprehended
by Jefierson, and pi-esaged by the Democratic party as lute ns 1868.
An unqualified despotism enacted by a free pcoidc upon themselves
can only be the result of general corruption and stupefaction of tho
public morals — ^a condition in no wise dependent upon the concentra-
tion or dispersion of sovereignty. The only form of centralization to
be feared is that which grows out of the existing method of making
appointments to Federal oflices — a method which, when first intro-
duced, Mr. Clay said would, if persisted in, “ finally end in u des-
potism as intolerable as that of Constantinople,” and which even
General Jackson, before his election to the Presidency, allowed would
tend inevitably to conniption.’ Centralization coming in this form
would be equally eflbctive whether the theories of State sovereignty^
or of'* national sovereignty should prevail. The immediate need of tho
American people and Government is a restoration of the permanent
civil service which prevailed during the first forty years after the
adoption of the constitution. Apart from this, it is thuHogicul
outcome of the war that the powers of the general government shall
continue to increase at the expense of the State governments, but
not at the expense of liberty. The right of secession having been
negatived beyond the possibility of dispute, its minor belongings,
wearing the generic name of State sovereignty, must fall with it,
not all at once, but as fast as they come iu collision with the
authority of the whole.

lIoRACK White.

(1) The unwarranted interference by the Federal judiciary and army in tho lait
Iioo&naaa election was a direct consequence and outgrowth of tho ** spoils system " of
eivilaenrioe.

ENGLAND AND TURKEY.

Deliver not the tasks of might

To weakness/'

All men of all parties are agreed — as they could not but be, the
facts once established — in their judgment on tho atrocities in Bul-
garia, one of those wild outbreaks of ferocity and lust which show
tho possible depth of evil in human nature when free from the
restraints of social order. I say in human nature, and do not con-
iine it to Turkish nature, as I sec there is too much inclination to do
under the impulse of the present excitement. Highest of all when
under control, worst of all animals when without law and justice,*' —
this judgment on man bears no restrictive application. Our just
abhorrence of the actual misdeeds of the Turkish troops seems to
mo to be hurrying us into unjust judgments and unwise actions.

For whilst I respect the motives of the present movement and
within limits, wliieh have at times been passed, I entirely concur in
the indignation expressed, so fur as it is the spontaneous expression
of a real national feeling in presence of a great wrong, there is much
in the language used which I deprecate, much in the conclusions
sought to be enforced w’hich I think dangerous, something at any
rate in the national attitude which I think unwarranted. Something
more of misgiving in this wholesale condemnation of another nation,
something more of humility on the score of past events in our own
history, something more of the sense of the community of nature
between the Turkish people and our own, might have increased the
value of our uUerance, and invested it 'with additional promise for
the future. Defective, however, as it has been in these respects, it
has a promise for the future : it constitutes an obligation which
cannot be eluded — the obligation w^henever and wherever there be
outrages on our common humanity, and that there will be such is
too probable, to reprobate them as w’e reprobate this present outrage.
For instance, whilst we loudly blame the Turkish mode of warfare
in Servia, the destruction of villages by fire, and the devastation of
the country, would it not be w^cll if some voices were ^raised against
our own practice, in the interests of the half-piratical trader too
often, of shelling African or other uncivilised populations? or
against such acts as in that unjustifiable Ashantce war was the
burning of Goomassie ? or in China the destruction of the imperial
palace?

With a certain reserve, then, I respect the judgment on the past.
But it is not with tho past we have now to d^, except so far as we

518 ENGLAND AND TUBKET.

can repair it ; and I trust the reporation will be of the amplest
kind, as it ought to be, considering the easy form which it may
take for the majority — that of money contributions. Those who, as
Lady Strangford, are willing to give their services in its distribution,
should have no difficulty in collecting the sum they ask.

There remains one point in reference to the past in which injustice
may be done. It is the responsibility attaching to the Turkish
Government — its complicity in these Bulgarian horrors. Govern-
ments, as a rule, are ill served by tlieir agents, who too often carry
out instructions in a way which those who gave them in no way
sanction. There have been exceptions, such as Jtimes II. in our
own countrj" and that of M. Thiers in France, where there is every
reason to think that the mercilessness of the ruler outran that of the
subordinates. But the nilc is the other way, and the supreme
government of Turkej* is probably, if we take the statements of the
two parties in England, not an exception. Xo doubt in the hour of
danger, with other revolts on its hands and the pros^wet of the
Servian and Montenegrin war, on hearing of the agitation and insur-
rection in Bulgaria, due, it would appear, to external intrigues, it
wished a speedy termination, — what has been so much praised in
England, — a vigorous stamping out of the evil at its beginning ; but
as a central government it does not seem to be further involved in
the actual transaction. Like most other governments, it would be
slow to recognise the misdeeds of its agents; but otherwise the
fault lies rather in its weakness and actual disorganization, us was
justly pointed out by Lord Derby, than in its intentions. That this
is the true view is, I think, evidenced by its permitting foreigners
to visit the localities and inquire for themselves, and tolerating tlieir
presence after their publication of the facts. 'Would Russia in l^oland,
the French Government after the suppression of the Commune, or
our own Government in the Indian mutiny, have been equally
patient ? It would seem that no government has a sufficiCht hand
upon its officers or its population — perhaps never has had, but
certainly has not in the present day — a weakness wliich evidences the
want of some more universal, more cogent influence to supplement
the action of governments. Look at Barbadoes, or our conduct in
Japan, or the dealings with the coolies in the Mauritius, of Queens-
land with the Oceanians.

And, generalising, how- few nations of Europe — ^is there any one
but Italy ? — which is so clean-handed as to be justified in using un-
measured abuse of Turkey. Nationally, as individually, the true rule,
dioubiless, is to blame ourselves first before we attack our neighbours :
but therei are occasions, and such is this reckless denunciation of one
compared with all others, when we survey the others, and
iaquize whether history justifies the implication of so complete a

ENGLAND AND TUBSEY. 519

disparity, and Poland, Algeria, Hungary, and Spanisli America rise
in its confutation.

I would gladly not write this, for in the prevalent one-sidedness
of judgments, I know to what it ^exposes me ; but when I see the
lengths to which a dominant impression carries many in this matter,
I feel it incumbent on me not to shrink from incurring any of the
risk attendant on an impartial judgment. **

In the present we have before us, practically, the choice of two
policies, or rather two guidances, that of the existing government
and of Mr. Gladstone, who I presume is ready to resume office. I
say practically, for others arc offered, but have no chance of being
accepted. If I allude to Mr. Grant Duff’s scheme, his dream he
calls it, it is because of some of its accidents, rather than from any
wish to discuss it fully. An Anglo-Indian administration under a
dignified head, — such is its summary for those who may have missed
it. lie docs not himself give the title of this dignified head, yet it
should have been given, or the project lacks definiteness. It is
implied that we are to have another Emperor of Western origin.

It seems to me a fresh instance of tho corrupting influence of our
Indian Empire. The temporary success of that experiment misleads
us to tho point of thinking that we are able to set the world in
order, when it is a question whether wc are not breaking down
under what we have already undertaken. It would appear to be a
postulate of a certain class of minds, that we, and we exclusively,
have a peculiar faculty for government of other races ; — ^an assump-
tion of the most oflensive and dangerous character, and which
rc{K)8es at bottom on a completely official view of the results
attained in our Indian dependency.

I would w'ish to speak with all due respect of a large body of
public servants, of our Anglo-India administrative corps ; but I have
a recollection of certain points in our history there, in times of
order and disorder equally, which suggest many objections to the
proposal we have before us. Seriously, was the suppression of the
Indian mutiny, even with what facts we have, and all competent
students allow that many are yet unknown, that a full picture of
the horrors of that suppression is for future generations — ^was, I ask,
the suppression of that mutiny so conducted that we could with
decency propose that the service which conducted it should furnish
teachers of justice and mercy to the Turks P I know not what the
language of the Constantinople goveirning classes was on the news
reaching it of an insurrection in Bulgaria ; but I do know something
of that of the Calcutta governing community at tho time of the
Sepoy revolt, and it could not be easily surpassed as an expression
of savage and vengeful cruelty. It is due to Lord Canning to say
that he was, fortunately, a noble exception.

620

BNOIAJH) AND TUfiKET.

Or, again, are we to take some Anglo-Indian proconsul of the
Dalhousie type, fresh from an unprincipled act of Burman spoliation,
committed in defiance of all right under the plea of destiny, and
think him a fit apostle to the Turks of moderation, of the duty of
resigning this or that possession, of the moral beauty of contracting
the red line of empire, of letting go provinces which their fathers
acquired. No, at every turn our own past history meets us, not to
stop our reasonable and thoughtful action for the better in the
present, but to show us the unseemliness of many of our pretensions,
and the wisdom of not seeking to increase our responsibilities.

And then the dignified head. Is it seriously proposed to take a
young prince, of untried capacity for government, — the command of
a ship of war is not by any means a particular recommendation, even
if well administered, — a prince brought up in the blinding influences
of the English court, more naturally blinding even than those of
aristocratic life, a prince who has in no way produced as yet a
favourable impression on a society disposed, as is evident from its
tone about the rest of his family, to be most indulgent, and place
him in a position requiring the highest gifts for rule, the most
accomplished statesmanship ? If he is to govern and not reign, the
proposal is absurd, and for a constitutional puppet the position is not
suited. So much on a point which it is difficult to touch. For in
the current of servility which has set in of late in favour of our royal
family, when only praise is allowed and any blame is thought dis-
creditable, the only refuge for self-respect is silence — where it is pos-
sible. I have only said wliut was necessary to clour me from any
participation in the prevailing adulation, which oppresses many
besides myself with a sense of shame.

But of the two guides who are feasible, I will take Mr. Gladstone
first. In adopting any one as a leader we naturally look to his
antecedents. It is a time for free speech on such points. Mr.
Gladstone’s own language is very free. Dazed by a revolting act,
which shocks all of us as much as it does him, he seems to have lost
his equilibrium, and to be hurrying himself and the nation on very
dangerous courses. What reason have we to follow him ?

By a passionate appeal to the humanity and honour of England, he
is thrusting a particular policy upon the Government, and practically
wresting the conduct of affairs out of its hands. Arc we to prefer
him to his rivals as the exponent of those powerful motives ? I
think he has in his vehemence been too forgetful of his past.

Others, Mr. Beesly for instance, have drawn attention to the
weakness of his position, on a survey of the past. 1 concur with
them, and in the judgment that he has been weak towards the strong,
strong "towards the weak, silent when Bussia or the Versailles
gorenunent were in question, violent against Naples and Turkey.

ENGLAin) AND HJBXEY.

62J

What more feeble than his list of our national misdeeds given at
Greenwich P It is easy to balance an account in your favour if you
omit important items, and why were India and Ireland left out of
Mr. Gladstone’s list P If introduced, would they have warranted his
conclusion P I cannot forget, either, his sympathy with the slave-
holder which led him to raise his voice on the side of the South in
the great American contest. Yet what is slavery, as an industrial
institution not domestic, in any case, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
English or Dutch P It is on their most revolting side, that of lust,
the Dulgarian horrors in permanence. Female honour is not for the
slave. So true is it, that one great critical suffering affects our
imagination and arouses our sympathy, when the slow enduring evil
under which generation after generation is borne down passes com-
paratively unnoticed.

Nor is the honour of England so compromised, whatever Mr.
Gladstone may say, by what has happened in Bulgaria, as by
numerous other parts of her conduct. It was far more palpably
at stake in Jamaica, India, and that semi-Indian outrage, the
Abyssinian raid. It is so in our opium policy in China, in our
oppression of Burmah. There is ample field in these last for Mr.
Gladstone’s solicitude about it. Not that I object to his speak-
ing in this present emergency, but there is that in the way in which
he speaks as against the Government, which such reminiscences
should prevent, and they arc introduced to justify the withholding
of our confidence.

Graver still — if wc consider all that it involves — is the retrospect
of his foreign policy. In thinking of him as the possible director of
our foreign policy, are we warranted by his antecedents in hoping
much from him ? I put aside the curious act by which he would
begin, an act, as Mr. Grant Duff justly observes, of direct war upon
Turkey — a somewhat intemperate opening.

I turn to the past. If we may judge by some recriminations
which passed between him and the present Premier, his colleagues
and his opponents did not estimate highly his action at the time
of the Crimean war.^ If I remember right, the attack was warded
by a remark that at that period ho did not take much interest in
foreign politics. But during his own Premiership such interest was
forced upon him, and his then policy was, I must think, disastrous,
and at the root of much of the present difficulty. It fell to him to

(1) In judging the Crimean Wariii’o arc too apt to confound two distinct series oi
events, the protection of Turkey from liussiun encroachment, and the aggression upon
Russia herself by sending our forces to the Crimea. It is this latter which is properly
the Crimean War, and which is a fair object of censure, as in every respect an unwise
venture, with no good prospect; The former is and was justifiable on all grounds.

VOL. XX. N.8. N N

622

SarOLAlO) AND TUBEEY.

Bteer England tlirougli tbe crisis of the Franoo-German war ; and
the general judgment at home and abroad was^ and is, that he failed
gravely. The temporary effacement of England — such is the expres-
sion which presents the position he gave his coirntry, to the imperil-
ling for long years of European concert, and to the necessitating his
actual adoption of an unsound policy. It shows the short memory,
or the inattention, or the excessive good nature of the nation, that it
should be possible for the idea to arise, that a statesman so tried
and so found wanting could again be entrusted with the highest
power.

As it is, owing to the unfortunate blunder of Germany in 1871
and to the tame acquiescence of Europe in her pretensions, the
Busso-Frussian combination has been encouraged to think itself the
ultimate appeal, free to act as it pleased in reference to eastern
Europe. The present policy of Mr. Gladstone, so far as we can
gather it from his speeches, would favour its claims. His compli-
ments all round must be taken for what they are worth ; but his
action would be to rely on llussia mainly in the arrangement with
Turkey. I would make no hobgoblin of llussia ; but it is excusable
to doubt whether in the game of Eastern complications Mr. Gladstone
would be a match for Frince Gortschakoff.

Be this as it may, he avows that he looks to the joint action of
England and Bussia in the present emergcnc}^ and there is a large
school which would follow him in this. Let mo indicate one objection
i)i limine to this policy. I assume that Mr, Gladstone, if in power,
would not carry out the wilder scheme of those who are at his back,
nor seek to eject the Turks by violence from Europe, nor sanction
Bussia in so doing. I assume, that is, — as I interpret his language,
lam warranted in assuming — that he so far accepts the “as you
were policy, as to look for modifications of the Turkish rule com-
patible with its existence. Now, Bussia has been almost from its
earliest entry into European politics the standing aggressor on
Turkey, constantly encroaching on her, constantly domineering over
her, in no ambiguous manner posing ns her successor. Belatively
Turkey is inferior in strength to Bussia, and has witnessed with just
alarm the growth of her opponent, and submitted, but with just
indignation, to her dictatori^ language. It is possible — ^Mr. Glad-
stone's faith is strong in her, but I should have thought Lord Gran-
ville^s experience might have weakened it ; — it is possible that Bussia
has abandoned her traditional policy and speaks merely in the
interests of justice and humanity. Her conduct in Servia is
singularly against this great change in her. She could, it is siUy to
doi^ it, have stopped her officers and soldiers from turning a Servian
inlo a Bussian attack on Turkey. But it is not in the nature of

ENGLAKD AND TUBEEY.

523

things that Turkey should accept without repugnance the influence
•of Russia. What she could yield honourably to the union of the more
Western powers — of Europe in the truest sense — she would bitterly
resent if imposed upon her by her haughty rival. Where it is possible
to avoid rousing a not unwarranted suspicion and irritation, it is
eurely wise to do so, and it is so in this case, if we mingle as little
■as may be Russia with our action. With the wisest attemper-
ing, that action will bo galling enough to the self-love of the Ottoman
nation ; it is but fair and also more prudent, more hopeflil of result,
to conciliate to the uttermost its feelings.

Turning to the Government in whose hands we actually are, it is
not needful to examine with equal fulness its claims or its merits in
the past. Mr. Gladstone tends, I do not say seeks, to supplant it ;
and we would know why. It is in power, and all that is necessary
is to see whether it be so far inferior to the substitute offered as at a
critical moment to make it imperative to change it. In point of
humanity, no one would accuse the members of the existing Govern-
ment of being less sensible to the Bulgarian horrors than any other
men who have read them. In their position a certain amount of
reticence was necessary, as I cannot but think there is a similar

•i ^

obligation resting on the leaders of the Opposition, who are always
possible ministers.

For their general record, it is not better, so far as I can see, nor
worse, than Mr. Gladstone's. They have condoned all the wrongs
'which he has condoned, have shared in the national misdoings as
largely as he ; possibly rather more. Hero and there, as in his case,
there have been exceptions. But in general, what I think Mr.
Spencer calls the bias of patriotism has had free play with the
present ministers as with their assailants, and the dictates of
humanity and the exigencies of our country's honour in reference to
them have been far too much ignored. And I fear will be ignored ;
for with the present Premier's oriental proclivities, which load him
to cling so strongly to our Indian empire that he has saddled us
with that odious title of Empress of India, there is little hope of a
moderate, really humane policy in the East. And in the West the
affair of Luxemburg, and their silence during the Franco-German
war, are far from reassuring. Yet with all deductions, I think the
general opinion has been hitherto, and there seems no reason to doubt
should continue to be, that so far as regards the honour of England —
a very delicate ground to tread on — ^it is safer with the actual Govern-
ment than with its predecessor. They seem less smitten with that
curious defect which is traceable in so many of the economical school
of statesmen — ^the men who look to exports and imports as the one
test of national well-being — ^the defect of any historical conception,

NN 2

624

ENGLAND AND TUEKET.

any constant sense of the importance of a well-matured foreign
policy.

At any rate, the ministers who now direct our foreign action have
not been exposed to the trial, and have therefore escaped the failure
of their predecessors, and there is so far more ground for hope that
.they will carry us well through the present storm. All that has
hitherto appeared warrants — broadly speaking — ^this conclusion.
It is much that they have not lost their self-possession, and that thev
venture, in contact with this present tumult, to weigh the real
merits of the case, and to risk no rash judgments. It is refreshing
to turn to their speeches after those of their assailants : I allude to
Lord Derby’s and Sir Stafford Northcote’s. On the details of their
actions it is very dangerous for a private citizen to enter, but I
cannot but think — speaking only of the act so far as it is open to
public cognisance — that their refusal of the Berlin Memorandum
was a wise measure. It was most desirable, if England was to
speak with effect in the councils of Europe, to show that she in no
way looked on herself as taken in tow by the imperial combination
of Eastern Europe — that she was an independent power, choosing
her own time and mode of action — that she was no longer effaced,
but present and to be reckoned with. Such an attitude is the first
condition of better things — ^that it will be the first step towards
them, this must remain uncertain. So again, the sending of her fleet
to Besika Bay, and that in great force, merits the applause it
gained. On the particular combination of motives I have no call to
enter. But its presence there, yes, in some sense as the ally of
Turkey, if only the Government use it rightly, is again a necessary
preliminary to a sound intervention — obviating, probably, many
embarrassments.

With Mr. Gladstone — I am happy to note my agreement, — and
perhaps before Mr. Gladstone, I think the prestige of England a
mischievous and immoral idea. I renounce all care for England’s
selfish interests. I invite him to carry out his renunciation to its
fair consequences. But with him, too, I make no doubt, I wish
England strong and respected. It is for the interest of Europe and
Hu manit y that it should be so. I welcome, by the way, the more
frequent introduction of this term Humanity, the implicit recognition
of its reality, in contradistinction to, and yet on the same footing
with, other smaller, but avowedly real, aggregations of men. I
wish, I have ever wished, that England should be as strong as she
was under Cromwell, but without any of the aggressive tendencies
which vitiated the great Protector’s foreign policy ; and it is
because I think that the measures of the present (^vemment are
calealated to replace her in a position in wUch she may be signally

ENOLAND AND TUBEET.

m

useful, and so repair the mischief wrought by a feebler administra-
tion, that I do what I can in its support. Statesmanship must be a
balance of evils in many cases, and it is often necessary to prefer a
general result of permanent value to the removal of even deplorable
immediate evils. Were it, then, shown that certain incidental evils
accompanied the action of the Government, it would not be its.
conclusive condemnation.

But, of course, all depends ultimately on the use made of a strong
position ; and any interpretation of the Ministry's conduct must be
subject to their future action. What their intentions and policy
may be, we have almost of necessity to wait for. Any criticism
solely concerns the past and passing events. What is to be wished
for — ^in other words, what the policy of England should be — this
is the question on which I now enter.

J have already said that from the school which gravitates towards
Bussia I wholly dissent ; and I have dwelt on the peculiar inappro-
priateness of calling her in in the treatment of Turkey. What is there
in the past history or present condition of Bussia that should make
her an object of our political preferences ? Within her own sphere,
and in the arduous task of raising her population and wisely
administering her already unwieldy empire, there is every reason to
wish her well, and when possible to aid her ; but her continued
expansion can be no object to any one. She has not shown in Poland
any peculiar ability in dealing with a more advanced people which
w^as sacrificed to her ambition ; why should she be competent to rule
wisely the Bouman or the Greek ? Her population was within these
twenty years serf, and the dispositions of her ruling classes and her
emancipated peasants are not likely to have been so modified from
what they were during the long continuance of serfage, as to make
them suitable rulers and guides of others. Was the condition of
the serfs in Bussia much, if any, better than that of the rayahs
under Turkish rule? There is every reason to doubt it. Buling
classes which so recently held their inferiors in such dependence as,
I believe, existed in Bussia, must take time to unlearn their habits,
as must those who have so long crouched to learn the habits of
freemen. It is not a quarter of a century that, under the conditions of
Bussia, intellectually and morally, will undo the work of generations.

Again, the religious organisation of Bussia singularly disqualifies
her for dealing aright with the various Christian populations of the
Turkish empire. Nowhere is the spiritual power so completely
fused with the temporal — God and Cajsar so inseparable. It is
clear from recent events that there is in Islam even less of this
intimate blending of the two powers. If allowed, not to encourage
in the interest of her own policy the discontent of the Christians,

526

EKGLAia) AND TUBEET.

but really to incorporate tliem in Her empire, wHcre would be the
freedom wHicH they now enjoy under the Moslem toleration, con-
temptuous toleration granted, but still toleration P From its acute
perception of this feature in Bussian policy, a perception sharpened
by her experience in Poland, the Boman Catholic Church sides with
the Turk as against the Christian Bussians, with a more just esti-
mate of the value of their Christianity than many of us have who
suffer ourselves to be misled by that vague term. But even were
there no such objections, why should the various divisions of the
southern population — Boumans, Bulgarians, Servians, Bosnians,
Gfreeks, Turks, &c . — vrhj should they come under Bussian domina-
tion and swell the forces of the Panslavic movement. Wo must
acquiesce in the inevitable ; but a wise policy will, I conceive, not
forward any vast Slavonian aggregate, which, imdcr present circum-
stances and feelings, may be a most serious danger to Germany, and
through her to European peace. New powers, conscious of strength,
and impelled only by an instinct of growth, arc not wisely en-
couraged by neighbours at whose expense they must grow, especially
when they can offer no contribution of value. If with such a power,
unwisely developed, Germany wfere in hostility, the struggle wera
most deplorable for both. If she were in unison with it, she would
lose rather than gain by the contract, and the combination would bo
most formidable for all Western Europe.

It is, in my judgment, the true interest, both for themselves,
and for Europe, of the subject states of Turkey at present to remain
so, always under the supposition that a tolerable existence is given
them. Even for Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the difficulty is
greatest, and another solution the most defensible, I, for one, should
acquiesce in the judgment of the powers if they found some
arrangement by which their connection with Turkey remained un-
severed. For Bulgaria, I should deprecate its severance, even to the
extent to which the two former might be separated. The unwise im-
patience of Servia goes to show lhat her comparative independence
was premature. It was never given her that she might be a fire-
brand in Europe, and be made the instrument of an unjustifiable
war. Sufficient control for the present must be allowed the imperial
state to prevent such dangers.

I hope, then, that, in no spirit of opposition to Bussia, but guided
by the whole antecedents of our past history, England will not rely
on her mainly, nor at all, in her action towards Turkey, but will,
as befits a great Western power, look to the other Western powers,
France, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Germany — (I wish I coidd add
Spain, in fact I would add Spain, — and the other Western powers
would hfi wise in inviting her concurrence, in replacing her, as Italy

EXGLAND AND TUMEY.

62 r

was placed in 1856, at the council table of Europe) — ^for her legitimate
coadjutors in the task of modifying Turkish misgovernment. It is
difficult to redeem the past, and such a concert of all is well-nigh
hopeless, but a firm and patient policy might do much to re-esta-
blish the union which on a former occasion proved so effective, and
to make it the basis for a further reunion of the West. Combined
more immediately with France and Italy, the two powers which
before rescued Turkey, England with them might address the Porte
in the name of the obligation then contracted, and concert with her
such a scheme as might effectually remove the evils complained of,
so far as governmental action can remove them, securing for her sub-
ject peoples the orderly administration under which they might
grow to be capable of self-direction. No one of these three powers
could bo suspected of any design of occupying the empire they were
protecting; they would not, therefore, in combination give any
legitimate umbrage to their European compeers. They have lost
twenty years, but this is not fatal ; it is a short period in a nation’s
history. They may take up the work which they should have done
twenty years ago.

If it was possible then — ^and all assume that it was — 'it is possible
now, so to act on Turkey as to render her internal government essen-
tially tolerable. It is not for me to sketch in detail the measures which
would effect this. I can only register the fact that all the language
used by the denunciators of Turkey does assume that such measures
might have been taken, and that our responsibility for recent occur-
rences consists in their not having been taken. Some things would
have to be undone. Is there not, for instance, a considerable burden
resting on Europe in regard to the powers it has claimed for its
consuls in Turkey? Has there not been much disorganization
consequent on our overbearing assertion of the rights of our fellow-
citizens, in defiance of the just claims of the Porte to self-direction.
I mention these points because I think that the intervening powers
would be bound to show the greatest possible respect for the
independent action of Turkey, forbearing all unnecessary evidence
of their influence, and conciliating, where possible, by a wise return
on the past.

Tho union of the three powers first named for joint action on
Turkey — ^with no wish to exclude tho others, with every wish rather
to have their co-operation — ^is, I must think, more in keeping with
past history and with the present interests of Europe than would be
the one against which I am arguing ; and, lastly, it would be surely
more agreeable to the power most immediately concerned. Nor
can I imagine that, if properly addressed, either France or Italy
would stand aloof from such a combination. It would tend, as I

528

EKGLAin) lin> TUBEET.

haye before Hinted, to strengthen the unstable equilibrium of Europe,
and in the best way, by calling into activity its more advanced
portions.

But it implies that I wish the continued existence of European
Turkey ; and it is this from which the dominant sentiment of the
nation, at any rate of the English meetings, is, I suspect, averse.
But I think there are grounds for wishing it from many points of
view. Whatever the judgment on the arguments urged, I feel still
a confident hope that, thanks to the action of our Government, the
mad attempt — ^mad not in the sense that it might not succeed, but on a
forecast of the evils it would entail in the succeeding, and after
the success — will not at present be made: the attempt, I mean,
forcibly to eject the Turks. So that we may well hope for time for
discussion of the problem.

I deprecate, as I have said, even the bag and baggage theory, the
total withdrawal, that is to say, of Bulgaria from Turkish rule, where
it is said that the immediate past has made its continuance impossi-
ble. May we not take a hint from a disagreeable episode in our
own history P The closest parallel with the Turkish suppression of
the Bulgarian insurrection is afforded by our own suppression of the
Irish rebellion of 1798. I wonder how many of the speakers at
these public meetings have studied the records of that event. They
are not difficult of access ; and had they been known, some of those
speakers must have modified their denipiciations — ^not so much of
the particular atrocities, as of the nation and government under
which they were perpetrated. The Irish horrors followed, with a
short and brighter interval, a long period of oppressive misgovern-
ment, which we too easily condone — the period of the celebrated
penal laws. They led to the Act of Union, and by no indirect
consequence to a different treatment of Ireland. Its full adoption
was delayed for a generation, but it was in the series of the conse-
quences of the rebellion, and was forced on by that event. ^May we
not hope similarly that, horrible as were the misdoings in Bulgaria,
they may issue, w'ith the temperate aid of Europe as above indicated,
in securing for that province a really ameliorated government.
Nations, like individuals, are aroused by some great crisis or sin, and
amendment may be the consequence. Certain it is, that if length of
failure be a ground for immediate expulsion, it was more applicable
to us in reference to Ireland than to Turkey in Bulgaria. For
both alike I wish, I believe in, ultimate independence. I repro-
bate for both all language, I dissent from all action, which should
^ose this prospect. I think English statesmen and Turkish
statesmen should prepare for and forward its attainment; but
whmi in England we hear it boldly proclaimed, as it was

529

ENGLAND AND TUBXXT/

by Mr. Forster, tbat we neyer will let Ireland go, can we
wonder if in Turkey conyulsive efforts are made to hold Bulgaria P

If the provinces are cut entirely loose, left to their own self-
government, they are exposed to the probabilities of quarrels with
their neighbours, to the almost certainty of intrigues from without.
If their existence was disorderly, either internally or in relation to
one another, the great border powers would soon interfere, and once
incorporated in one of them they would have but a distant hope of
their independence. I believe that Bulgaria, at any rate, feels this,
and that with some moderate but real security for a better
government they would be glad to be free from foreign intrigues,
and to nurse themselves for the ftiture. After all there is consider-
able toleration in the Turkish central government, as is evidenced by
the action of the American missionaries and the establishment of
schools of the non-dominant faith. In fact, by every account of the
condition of Bulgaria, it was, before its unhappy insurrection,
healthily growing under the Turkish sway. The want is, a
thorough quickening of the central action, so as to check the action
of the local administration — a want, be it observed, not peculiar to
Turkey. In all countries I fear, in their present moral condition,
self-government means scarcely more than the government of the
strong, more or less oppressive to the weak ; our own country cer-
tainly is no exception. Such a quickening of the central adminis-
tration in Turkey I believe quite possible.

Such is the conclusion I advocate for the various smaller states
ulteriorly to issue from the Turkish rule. We cannot at a moment’s
notice change the relations or undo the effects of centuries. Much
of the language applicable to Western Europeans would be out of
place in dealing with these Eastern peoples, who have not passed
through the discipline which has modified the West.

But what, leave these Christian populations under Mahommedon
rule P The cry comes not from the statesmen on either side, it must
be said, though there is too much about the peculiar modification of
Islam in the Turk, but it represents, I suspect, much of the feeling
which is stirring our country. Nor with many does it stop there.
It would go to the utter expulsion of the Turks from Europe, as a
contamination of the soil of Christendom, a soil over which none but
so-called Europeans should hold sway. I do not share the feeling,
quite the contrary ; and I think it fraught with most evft conse-
quences in the present, and for a long period of the future.

I proceed to explain myself on this most difficult subject. The two
faiths, the faith of Christ and the faith of Allah — ^the religion of St.
Paul and the religion of Mahommed — are both to be respected for their
services ; each has its peculiar merits. If the Eastern creed is simpler

530

ENGLiJ^D AND lUEEEY.

and nobler as a doctrine than the Western, the utility of tbe latter is
I think greater, or has been greater, owing to the inheritance it
received and the conditions of its propagation. If in some respects,
it is unquestionable that the nations of the West are in advance
of the Moslems, it is hardly to the difference in their religion that we
can fairly impute their superiority. There was a time when the
disciples of Islam were distinctly in the van of civilisation, in the
points where now they are most behind the West, and there was a
time when in all the moral qualities they were certainly not inferior*
Even in the fierce wars between the Christian and the Mussulman,
neither the physical nor moral preeminence was always on the side
of the former. I will take a capital instance. I recall the striking
scene when in the city of Jehovah the Crescent and the Cross met in
deadly struggle. Christian historians have made no secret of the
complete triumph of all the fiercer passions over the precepts of
Christianity. They have not hesitated to paint the victors as at least
the equals in barbarity of the vanquished. No age or sex spared,
seventy thousand said to have been the number of the victims.” This
for the darker side of both. On the brighter, the equality, to say
the least of it, of some of the Moslems had not escaped the fair mind
of Sir Walter Scott. He has not scrupled to make the Prince of
Scotland inferior to his Moslem rival by virtue of the somewhat
brutal contempt which contrasts so unfavourably with Saladin’s
courteous toleration of an antagonist’s faith.

Such being their relation in the past, the two creeds have now for
many centuries rested quietly side by side, each directing its own
portion of the world. Deliberately, 1 do not believe any one would
wish to revive their hostilities. But does not all this abuse of the
Turks tend that way P For at the head of the Moslems, as a political
power with certain latent capacities, the Turks have long stood and
stand, and unmeasured denunciations may call those latent capacities
into action, and inflict on the world a war in which fanaticism should
be one of the motive powers. I have no fear that any such risk
would be run by a wise pressure of the more friendly Western
powers, in the name of the purely human interests of peace, order,
and good government ; and were there some risk, it might be incum-
bent on us to confront it, with such aims.

But there is more than this. The alienation of the East from the
West, of Asia from Europe, is not diminishing in these later years,
but is on the increase rather ; — as a result of the coarse and oppressive
intrusion of our industrial society, the offensive iteration of our
claims to superiority, lastly of our spirit of conquest. I am not
speaking of England exclusively. A reaction against us is possible,
even probable ; and if thera is none, yet enforced submission is

ENGLAND AND TUEKET.

531

covert hatred, and all real union of the two worlds is out of the
question. At once Asiatic and European^ as a consequence of its
position and history, the Turkish nation offers us a test of the spirit
in which the stronger West is disposed to deal with the more dis-
organized families of man. It has shown, and its present weakness
is largely due to this cause, a wish to enter more completely into the
European family, and to propagate its influence further eastward.
Wise statesmanship, guided by an instinct of what was good for
Humanity, for the whole race, would avail itself of this existing
intermedium, even though not the best that could be wished, but as
the only one ready to hand. Far from seeking to eject the Turks
from Europe, it would see in them a means for smoothing the differ-
ences between the continents, the races, and the creeds — ^for breaking
down the barriers which now separate the various portions of man-
kind, and for showing that one common Humanity could override all
minor differences. I say not that any statesmanship by itself can
effectually secure this result, but it might work towards it with what
the past has handed down, rather than under an ill-governed impulse
throw aside what we have, and launch itself on new and uncertain
combinations.

Any such considerations are alien and probably distasteful to the
Christian mind. I am addressing mainly what I may call inorganic
Christians, not the sagacious organisation of Papal Borne. Tet
it is clear that no purely Christian policy can avail us here. The
extermination of the Moslems is not more impossible than is their
conversion to the Christian faith, in which they would see — it sounds
strangely to Christians — a retrogradation. If there is to be
harmony provisionally, wo must consult so large a portion of the
earth’s inhabitants which, and I deplore the fact, grows rapidly ; in
fact more rapidly than the Christians ; the relative growth does not
interest me. We must make it manifest that we have a common
ground with them, community of interests and feelings ; that we in
no sense claim to be different beings, and if in any way we are
superior, seek only to impart our superiority. We have then to
accept and honour their faith as one of tho facts of our complex
existence, to understand and respect their social organisation, to
learn what they have to teach us — ^and all observers allow that there
is something — and to teach what they have to learn. We are told
that we ought to shake hands with Bussia as a brave and honourable
opponent. Most true ; but extend the teaching ; widen the area of
your sympathies. Let Christendom and Islam, also brave and
honourable foes in the past, also shake hands and agree to put aside
their antagonism. The initiative is and must be with Christendom,
with the West. So far no one would contest. If the conclusion is

532

ENGLAKB AND TUEEEY.

one from whicli the popular instmct as yet revolts, this only diows
how weak we are in toleration, — ^how there still lurks in us, under
all our language of peace, the instinct of domination, — ^how, in spite
of all our claims to enlightenment, we are animated by a contemp-
tuous intolerance of the convictions of others.

Herein, and in the source from which such feelings spring, the
confident presumption of the exclusive truth of the prevalent creed,
lies a powerful obstacle to human unity, baffling the wiser counsels
of the statesman as well as the aspirations of mankind. Yet not
destined to baffle them finally, and all steps towards its removal
that are possible should be taken. Least of all should any backward
steps be taken, and I much fear that we are in the way to take such
backward steps, to shatter one of the combinations which, not the
traditional policy of England at present in such disfavour, but the
instinctive wisdom of generations of European statesmen has
bequeathed us.

But the Turks — ^if it were only this, that, or the other branch of
the Mahommedans, and not the Turks — ^the one great anti-human
specimen of humanity ! Christians surely should be slow to speak
so. What becomes of St. Paul’s declaration, probably not ques-
tioned by Mr. Gladstone, that God has made of one blood all nations
of men for to dwell on the face of the earth P Such, however, is
the decorous and moderate language used by a possible premier of
England, the noblest, we are told by Mr. Fawcett in his unworthy
speech, and the best of Englishmen, to whom we are to look for
guidance in the crisis, and whose accession to power with such an
utterance unretracted is well nigh a declaration of war upon Turkey.
What a dangerous element is the rhetorical statesman, the man in
whom the organ of expression overbalances the higher faculties.
Well, the Turks — you must accept them, there they are — approxi-
mately twelve millions of men, whom Mr. Gladstone thus attacks.
The practical ruler has to deal with existing materiaTs, and were
the nation justly designated as above, it is with it that we have to
reckon. But the judgment even in the past is entirely overstrained,
and in the present it is a pure anachronism — ^an expression of a
mediseval reminiscence, nay, below the level of the highest
mediaeval conceptions, even when the alarm was yet justifiably
strong. I am not called, however, by my argument to defend the
Turks when I repudiate such a monstrous exaggeration. I have
only to urge that, be they what they may, it is our duty to observe
towards them the common human respect, and our duty and our
mtorest to bring them into co-operation with us for the common
good. <7ertain animal races have to be extirpated as irreconcilable
with man. It is a sad necessity. Certain races of men have been

ENGLAin) ASJy TUSEEY.

538

extirpated^ not by Turks, but by colonial Englidimen ; others are
in process of disappearance ; but only one speaker, so far as I have
seen, has called for the extirpation of the Turks as we extirpated
the wolf, and the human feeling of my countrymen cherishes no
such atrocious thought.

They must remain, then, in Europe or out of Europe— another
fact of our complex existence — ^to bo recognised as an object for true
statesmanship, pending a deeper and more powerful action. That
the fact should be not merely recognised, but welcomed as, with all
drawbacks, a valuable element towards solving the difficult problem
of the union of mankind — on this I will not insist Airther.

The essential obstacle to that union lies in the existence of dif-
ferent faiths, and in the moral attitude which that difference
ordinarily involves, the opposition between Christianity and Islam
being its most capital instance. In the dilapidated state of Christian
belief in the rulers of Europe, who cling to it more as a social power
than from mental conviction, there ought to be no difficulty in either
of these respects ; they can, as their predecessors have done, treat
the matter on purely human grounds. And the populations at their
back will be no real embarrassment if judiciously dealt with, as they
are in reality swayed mainly by human motives. The task, there-
fore, of Western statesmen is far easier in regard to any approxima-
tion to Islam, than is that of the Islamic leaders in approaching
Christendom. Behind these latter the mass is sincerely animated
by an attachment to the dogmas of its creed, so easily comprehended,
so capable of taking deep root, so interwoven with all their doily
life. Great straightforwardness, great patience, great respect are
necessary, both in the chiefs of this mass and in the leaders of the
West, in the approaches made to them. With all precautions the
progress must be slow ; but it is too much in the course of events, in
the wants of Humanity, that some union should be effected, for the
attempt to fail. It must evidently be first made by those for whom,
it is the easiest. And the first step is the removal of irritation and
alarm — all elements of suspicion. No shadow of a proselytising
spirit should be perceptible — ^not the remotest ground given for
thinking their faith attacked or undervalued.

So relative a spirit is a hard thing to reconcile with Christianity.
Hence the necessity for its ultimate disappearance as a hindrance to
the union so much desired.

But enough on this point. It may be that, as it has been pre-
dicted, the Turks will themselves return to Asia, or it may be that,
under a nobler faith, they may remain in peaceful juxtaposition with
the other co-existent peoples— conquerors and conquered merging in
one political body, their past differences forgotten in present union.

534

ENOLAKD AND TUBEET.

So long as they stay where they are, and keep their actual faith, they
have a great T^ue, not felt now for the first time, as enforcing the
necessity, even within the limits of Europe, of rising into u region
above ^e two antagonist religions of the past. If suddenly we
suppose them removed to Asia, this necessary step in human advance
might be adjourned, not pressed so immediately on the attention of
statesmen. The two continents, already so opposed in common
thought, would be in more complete isolation one from the other,
and the disposition of the European to contemn and domineer over
the Asiatic would not be confronted by a yet considerable European
power. Nor, again, would the difficulties their presence creates have
been turned to the best account by meeting them and overcoming
them ; they would have disappeared, but leaving an unsatisfactory
sense of want of competence — a discouragement for the future ;
whereas, rightly solved, they would have been a guarantee of subse-
quent progress.

Such are some of the considerations which I offer in favour of the
status quo^ wisely modified, and against any abrupt cutting of the
knot.

They evidently are not limited to the immediate present, any
more than they arc based on a view bounded by the immediate
past- The ultimate aim being the unity of Humanity, all the
intermediate steps must be judged by reference to it. Our advance
towards that aim has been continuous in the past when no such goal
was recognised, or but faintly recognised, and by few. Now that it
has come into more general cognisance and may be made the object
of conscious effort, everything that can intensify the continuity of
the advance is of importance, every available transmission from the
past preserved. Above all, no violent disruption should be tolerated,
when it is possible by human foresight to avoid it.

It is in this conservative spirit that I have* written, not unduly
conservative I hope. For I wish for very lar^R modificatiffns in the
state of the subject populations of eastern Europe, and I look for
gradual changes in the directions which past changes have taken.
But daily does the conviction grow stronger, that in this case as in
many others, we are too exclusively bent on political changes when a
change of a different order is the real want — a moral and religious
renovation — ^the fruitful and direct source of social and political
changes of which we scarcely now dream.

Acquiescence in very defective political arrangements is often
most desirable at the present day. Acquiescence, but with judicious
attempts at modification. The first need is to influence the rulers,
the dominant powers, be they individuals or nations ; to bring home
to them their great duty of preparing those they rule for a higher

ENGLAin) AKB TUfiKET.

535

and freer state. Benouncing impatient and premature efforts, the
eubjects may yet make their rulers feel the necessity of continuous
advance, and its safety when such a temper is in tho ascendant. So
the peaceful co-operation of ruler and ruled in the common work of
advance may be best secured. Immediate solutions are too much in
request, for they are imperfect and often interfere with the more
perfect.

Once let there come a general recognition by the leading minds
in all countries — and this is nearer than we think — say not of the
religion of Humanity, but of the conception, at once ideal and
real, of Humanity ; that all nations and fragments of nations are
but parts of one great family ; all bound to concord and union, each
In its several local habitation having opportunities and advantages
which it can use in the common cause ; each bound by the obligation
not to disturb the common work by undue claims or impatience under
its particular assignment ; let this general conception become, as it
is becoming, a familiar idea, and a calmer temper must be its imme-
diate outcome. It is but applying to nations the doctrines which all
hold wisest for individuals, and such application of moral doctrines
is the truest line of progress open to us, it is the subordination of
politics to morals.

In the expression she has given to what I hold in the main to have
been a noble impulse, England cannot expect to have tho admiration
of other nations, on account of her past shortcomings — ^to use the
mildest word. But she may earn it, if she persevere in her present
sentiments. She has entered on a course, I will hope, from which
she will not flinch when, as is probable, she will shortly be tried by
some new iniquity, in regard to China for instance. It will behove
her to be on the alert, if she would not be chargeable with being
keen-sighted only for the flaws in others. So of her leaders, lay or
clerical, in this present outspokenness. In past years they have been
remiss. Will they continue to be so P It is one thing, let statesmen
and bishops remember, to speak when the popular and even commer-
cial feeling is with you, another when it will be bitterly opposed to
you ; and I wait for some of m^r contemporaries, whose names I seo
appended to letters now, when the hunger for new markets over-
rides all moral considerations as between nations, or when the lust
of imperial aggrandisement renders us deaf to all sense of a higher
greatness. I hope that I, and those who with me have hitherto stood
alone on such questions, shall for the future be powerfully supported.
jSuch support will be most welcome, however opposed the convictions
on which it rests.

The preservation of peace immediately, and a policy tending
towards increased union of the divergent elements of the human

536

MOLANl) iin) lUSXEY.

&nuly, flttdi are the two great objects to aim at. As I think the
present Gfovemment is bent on the first consdoosly, and instinctively
is promoting the second, I hope it will hold out against the storm
and resist the intrusion of countervening projects. But the storm
does not seem to abate, and we may see a new Government, with
one of two results — either the disappointment of the hopes of those
who have home it into power, or their gratification by a disturbance
of the peace of Europe, and a rekindling of the latent fires of reli-
gious hostiliiy. England, as more safe from the proper sufferings of
war, diould be peculiarly cautious how she leads to them, and great
is the req)onsibility of those statesmen who help her to forget this
duty; nor can any indignation, however righteous, diminish this
responsibility, if it be allowed to supersede the dictates of calm
reason.

Richard Congreve.

som AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

Intebest in the East is now transferred from the battle-field to the cabinets
of the great Powers. The Turks have failed hitherto to gain any decisive
advantage. In the early days of the month a series of fierce straggles took
place m front of Alexinatz. It was believed for a moment that the Turks
had won a complete victory, and that the routed Servians had nothing
left but to sue for peace. These rumonrs proved to be exaggerated.
Tcbernayeff’s army had received a check, as was admitted even in
Belgrade. But whether it was that the Turks were not able to profit by
their success, or that Tchcmayeff had been less seriously worsted than had
been supposed, the fact remains that after the battles of the first days of
September the Turkish army made no advance. One of the wings even
drew back under the pressure of Horvatoritch’s division. Alexinatz, which
Tchemayeff wished to abandon, and which, as is said, was only defended
for the sake of moral effect, and only by a very small body of troops, has
not been taken by the Turks. The situation of the two armies remams
unchanged. Except on the side of Soitschar, the Ottoman armies have
not succeeded in penetrating the territory of the Principality. Every day
that passes, strengthens the Servian army, while the rains inflict serious
annoyance on the Turks, who destroy everything in their passage, no longer
finding food or shelter or resources of any kind whatever.

On the other hand, Bussians of all ranks and conditions cross the Danube
every day to reinforce the Servian army. In this way upwards of 600
officers have already been received. Committees have been formed all
over Bussia to equip and despatch volunteers to fight in the holy war of
deliverance. Arms of precision, ammunition, even cannon, arrive at
Belgrade. Thus the Servian troops will bo for the future better drilled,
better commanded, and better armed. Under pressure from England, a
suspension of hostilities was agreed upon, to last ten days. From Con-
stantinople the word has been given to the armies to remain on the defensive,
and Tchemayeff will hold the same, position. On both sides they complain
of violations of the armistice, and at Belgrade they are insisting that a
regular armistice should bo formally signed. Evidently the armistice will
have to be prolonged. It is not in ten days nor m thirty days that they
will come to such terms as will satisfy Europe, and as Bussia can accept.

The suspension of arms seems as if it must extend also to Montenegro
and Herzegovina. Not on this side, any more than on the other, has any
serious resdt been achieved. It was believed for a moment that Mnkhtar
Pasha was defeated, surrounded, and forced to capitulate. Shortly after-
wards we learn that he has taken the o&nsive. Since the beginning of
September, Montenegro has been attacked on two sides at once : on the
south towards the Albanian frontier by Dervish Pasha, who has about
80,000 men at his disposal, and on the north by Mukhtar, who having

VOL. XX. KJ. 0 0

638

HOME AND POHEIGN AFFAIBS.

extricated liiinself and received reinforcements, finds himself at the head
of from 16 to 20,000 men of rather poor quality. On September 6,
Dervish Pasha, in the attempt to carry Pipari, met with an obstinate
resistance. Towards the end of the day the Montenegrins threw themselves
upon the Turks, sword in hand, and put them to flight with enormous
slaughter. Mukhtar dares not advance beyond the Gradovo. In short the
armies have decided nothing, and it is not at all certain, as was for a time
believed, that the armies of the Sultan can make themselves masters of
Montenegro and Servia.

The Porte announced the conditions of peace to bo imposed upon the
Principality, which it already reckoned as beaten. These terns are : —

1. Occupation of the fortresses which had Turkish garrisons before 1857 ;

2. Destruction of the fortresses constructed by Servia since 1857 ; 8. In-
vestiture of Prince Milan at Constantinople ; 4. Bcduction of the Servian
forces to 10,000 men and 3 batteries ; 5. Construction of a railway across
Servia, under Turkish management ; 6. An indemnity for the expenses of
the war.

The whole European press, except that of Austria, has declared these
conditions impossible to accept. It is inadmissible that the Turks, still
reeking with the blood of the Bulgarians, should reappear at Belgrade in
the broad daylight of civilised countries. If Prince Milan were to accept
investiture at Constantinople, he would be immediately dethroned. A rail-
way, again, in the hands of the Turks is neither more nor less than occu-
pation in disguise. The telegraph announces that already the Porto is
willing to reduce its exigencies. It would accept Prince Milan without a
new investiture. It would only require a war indemnity spread over ton
years and added to the annual tribute ; and the occupation of two fortresses
until the indemnity has been paid. In Montenegro they would maintain
the status quo ante hfllum. Lord Bcaconsfield even gave it to be under-
stood at Aylesbury that Turkey would leave to the Powers themselves the
task of arranging the conditions of peace — a very dexterous move.

Evidently, it is not these conditions of peace which will raise any diffi-
culty. As for Servia and Montenegro, the Porto will be contented with
the very smallest measure of satisfaction, and the Powers willjpasily induce
it to require nothing beyond an insignificant augmentation of the annual
tribute by way of war indemnity. The Porte will be satisfied with moral
effect. It is no small thing for it to have shown that the Ottoman Power
was not so fallen and degraded as had been supposed, that it can still
collect armies, can equip them, and can fight with as much tenacity as in
any previous war. The great difficulty lies in the measures to be taken for
withdrawing Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria from Turkish tyranny.
We must not forget that there was the origin of the present situation, and
the subject of the Andrassy Note and the Berlin Memorandum. Now that
the atrocities committed on the Bulgarians are fully confirmed by the official
report of the English government agent, the measures of security that were
recommended at Berlin will hardly appear sufficient even to England. It will
be necessary to give to these unhappy provinces some kind of self-govem-

HOME AND FOBEIGH AFFAIRS.

539

ment, and to place them under the authority of Christian governors, with
Christian subordinates. In short, it will be necessary to devise a situation
for them such as Servia held prior to 1857, the Turks preserving a nominal
suzerainty and the right of occupying certain towns and of drawing an
annual tribute, but the population carrying on their own administration and
regulating all the processes of tax-gathering.

Now we ought not to disguise from ourselves that the Porte, which
believes itself to bo victorious, will not easily accept conditions so stem,
and they would hardly have been more stem if she had been com-
pletely defeated. Opinion, distracted by the shock of arms, seems to bo
concerned only with the differences between Servia and Turkey. In
reality this is nothing more than an episode or interlude. The grave
issue lies between Turkey and Europe, or rather between Turkey on the
one hand, and on the other, Russia, supported by Germany, and thus
drawing Austria, in spite of itself, along with her. Hero is obviously
the knot of the problem. The Porte will never accept the conditions
required by Russia, and by the whole of civilised Europe as well (except
the Hungarians and Austro-Germans), unless it is convinced that they
will proceed by way of execution, that is to say, that the Powers will
impose by force any solution on which they decide. If at Constan-
tinople they suppose they can count on a divergence of opinion
among the Powers, of course they will not yield. They will take
advantage of the smallest hesitancy, to reject their demands, even if
backed by all the great Powers. If the Turks think that England or
Austria will oppose the employment of force in case of need, they will make
abundant promises of reform, they will dismiss and punish the functionaries
whom Europe holds responsible for the crimes perpetrated on the Bulgarians,
but they will not consent to the radical reforms which are the only possible
means of preventing the recurrence of similar outrages. The capital point
is, then, that the great Powers should come to an agreement and uphold a
common programme.

Is such unanimity possible ? All hero depends on England. The
Hungarians and the Austro-Germans are extremely hostile to the Servians ;
they are for no measure that would have as a result the erection by their
side of independent Slav states, the embryo of a Slavic confederation of
the south, which would draw to itself the Austrian Slavs. Count Andrassy
understands how dangerous it will be to quit the alliance of the three
Emperors, and consequently if he is isolated, he will see himself forced to
support the demands made by Russia and Germany ; but if England breaks
the European concert, and refuses to bo a party to requiring from the Porte
such reforms as arc thought indispensable by the northern courts, she will
perhaps be followed by France and by Austria. A profound divergence of
views will divide the great states, and all the perils of a European conflict
will rise up. It is clearly then of the highest necessity that England should
in the interest of European peace renounce the policy she has pursued up
to the present time, and should adopt that which has been sketched by
Lord Stratford de Bedcliffe, and less definitely by Mr. Gladstone also.

o o 2

540

HOME AND FOBEIGN AEFAIB8.

It is on this account that the profound movement of opinion that now
agitates England is a piece of immense good fortune for Europe. It
may be the means of escaping a general war. Wo know few spectacles so
fine, so moving, as that offered by England to-day : — Mr. Gladstone, by his
admirable pamphlet (Sept. 6) and by his speech at Blackheath (Sept. 9)
setting all hearts aflame ; members of parliament, leading statesmen,
bishops, citizens in all the great towns, workmen — in short all the living
and thinking part of the nation, raising up so powerful a voice in condem-
nation of Turkey, and breaking once and for all with traditional British
policy in the east.

There are for England two courses to pursue in eastern affairs. She
may either sustain the Turkish government and sacrifice the Christian
populations ; or on the other hand, she may help the emancipation of the
Christian populations at the sacrifice of the Turkish government. So long
as it was credible that the Jurks, by borrowing the ideas, the institutions,
the money of the West, could develop a strong and wholesome power, then
we could understand everything being done iii its defence and succour.
Such a policy was apparently the very surest means of withdrawing Turkey
from the covetousness of her neighbours. But now that we see clearly that
the things which were to save Turkey have led to her ruin, and that nothing
can arrest her decline, it is best to turn frankly to her nearest heirs and
successors. It is to these to whom we owe succour and defence, that they
may grow strong enough to protect their independence. From the moment
of beginning this Summary nearly a year ago, we have not ceased to preach
this policy, and everything that has come to pass since the first of January
of the present year has only strengthened us in this opinion. The Disraeli
Cabinet has not frankly followed either one policy or the other. Under a
false semblance of strength and firmness, its conduct has been a tissue of
contradictions. The purchase of the Suez Canal shares might have been a
good measure if it was the opening of a new policy ; but fr om the Turkophil
point of view' it was a great mistake, for it seemed to be the signal for the
partition of the Turkish Empire, and to authorise llussia to begin to think
and ask about her share. The title of Empress of India conferred upon the
Queen, and openly proclaimed by the Prime Minister himself as a defiance
and a warning to Russia, was simply a dangerous puerility. Hext the
Cabinet accepted the Andrassy Note, and rejected the Berlin Memorandum
which asked for no more. Then with immense ostentation it sends to
Besika Bay not a few ships with troops to be disembarked in case of need
for the protection of the Christians, but the most formidable fleet in the
world, with all the air of having a mission to defend the Turks, come what
might ; and all the quidnuncs of the continent as well as of England itself
clapped hands at a display of force, of which the Ministry was so proud.
Later on, Mr. Disraeli speaks in the lightest and easiest of tones of the
excesses charged against the Turks ; he denies them ; he excuses them ; and
now that he is crushed under the testimony of his own agents, he ia obliged
to shelter himself behind pitiful subterfuges.

In his speech at Aylesbury (Sept. 20) Lord Beaconsfield informs ns that
thanks to* the urgency of Lord Derby the Porto will grant Servia a generous

HOME AND FOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

541

peace, of which she has left it to the Powers themselves to dictate the terms.
This was easy to foresee. But what is wanted to prevent new insurrections
and new troubles within a very short time from now, is to liberate the
populations in such a way as to withdraw them from the cruel and brutalis-
ing tyranny of the Turks. On this point Lord Beaconsfield does not say a
single clear or satisfactory word. Lord Derby in his reply to the deputa-
tion of the working classes says what is more re-assuring, when he assented
to the propriety of taking measures to prevent the recurrence of such events
as the Bulgarian horrors. But unless they order in a satisfactory way the
position of tho Christians in the Turkish provinces, then it is a mistake to
save Scrvia from tho consequences of'her aggression, and not to compel her
to reduce her forces ; for she is certain to begin the same struggle over again
at tho earliest opportunity possible, in the hope of gradually exhausting the
enemy. In affairs so difficult and thorny as those of South-eastern Europe,
nothing is worse than a vacillating policy, which' is for conciliating both of
two mutually hostile powers. If you want to keep tho Turkish power, you
should allow it to crush Ser^’ia and Montenegro, so as to make it hopeless
for them to think of war for many a day. If on the contrary you think
that the interests of humanity and peace enjoin tho restriction of Turkish
power, you should insist on the complete emancipation of the Christians.
Tho soldiers proclaimed Prince Milan king of Servia ; and, though they
have been disowned at Belgrade, this is a symptom of the aspirations of
the people. If they were supported by England, far from turning towards
8t. Petersburg, they would bo the first to defend their independence, and it
is on the West and not on the North that they would be most eager to lean.

The line of conduct for England is clearly traced for her. There is no
question at this moment of driving the Turks over the Bosphorus, and
founding a Slavic empire or republic. That is the inevitable work of the
futui'c, but nobody, save a few enthusiasts, makes any such proposal as this
for the programme of to-day. Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby, while
repelling with indignation all such designs, are fighting with windmills, as
they know very well. It is a question simply of giving to the Turkish
provinces such a degree of self-government as will withdraw them from the
rapacious exactions and detestable government of the Turks, and as will
enable them to develop their existence in freedom, under so fairly intelligent
an administration as they can command. It is strange how ordinary
politicians blinded by traditions have such dim ideas on their true
interest, after the situation has undergone a change. At this moment it is
demonstrated to the whole world that the Turkish power is tottering and
crumbling. Lord Derby himself pronounced its funeral oration. The
Turkish power in Europe, like the temporal power of the Pope, is an
anachronism which the progress of civilisation must necessarily banish. The
decay of tho Turkish empire began in the seventeenth century, after the
great defeat of 1688 before Vienna. That decay has never stopped, and
now it goes on apace under tho action of European influence.

This being so, what is the interest of Bussia and of England ? The interest
of Bussia is that the Turkish Slavs should be sufficiently awake and on the
alert to bear the Mussulman yoke with impatience, in order that they may turn

542

HOME AND EOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

to Bussia for support ; but it is not her interest that they should be completely
independent, for then they would cherish their rights of self-government,
and would have no desire to submit themselves to Russian despotism.
The interest of England, considered as the antagonist of Russia, is exactly
the opposite. England ought to desire that the Christians should be per-
fectly tranquil, or, if that be not possible, then that they should be as inde-
pendent as Roumania and as Servia, so that they need no longer appeal to
the Russians for their assistance. In the negotiations which have been
opened at Constantinople, it is England then, much more than Russia, who
ought to show herself the most exacting, and to stipulate for the greatest
degree of self-government for the Christians. The fact that there is a con-
siderable minority of Mussulmans in Bosnia and in Bulgaria is not a serious
difficulty, if the administration is in the hands of a Christian governor in-
vested with sufficient power. The example of Algeria proves this suffi-
ciently. If Bosnia and Bulgaria were well governed and withdrawn from
the detestable economic system which weighs them down, in a few genera-
tions they would form prosperous little states. These if made into a federa-
tion, would form a respectable power, and under the protection of Austria
would be well able to defend their own liberty.

The interest of Austria is not so easy to discern. If there spring up
on the other side of the Danube prosperous and self-governing Slav
states, then it is possible that the Slavs of Croatia, Dalmatia, and
Hungary will gravitate in that direction. But this is a future that can-
not be avoided, except by utterly crushing both Servia and Bosnia after
the fashion of the Bashi-Bazouks in dealing with the Bulgarians. This
Europe would assuredly not endure. What remains to bo done 9 To make
friends of the southern Slavs and to attract them within the sphere of
Austrian influence. At present Austria has made herself detested by the
Danubian populations, because the Magyar journals and the Germans of the
empire have defended the cause of the Turks with an excess of partisanship
that sometimes bordered on downright ferocity. Fortunately Count
Andrassy has not followed this line, and if England in accord with Russia
were to ask for radical changes, Austria would support them rather than be
left outside of the European union.

One great difficulty in the way of effective results will be the eagerness of
the Porte to promise everything that any one chooses to ask. The imperial
Hatt published a few days ago by the new Sultan, Abdul Hamid, will be
brought forward as the programme of a complete transformation of the
empire. The Sultan enumerates with perfect frankness all the vices that
are sapping his State — irregularities in every branch of the service, corruption
and venality in the officials, injustice in the law courts, general disorder, the
decay of industry and o^ agriculture. All these evils ho sets down to neglect
of the religious law, and in this he may be right, for the Turks of the old
school were worth infinitely more than the Europeanised Turks. A general
council is to be constituted whose mission will be to see that the laws are
respected, and a balance maintained in the budget. The functionaries chosen
among the most capable and honest men to be found will cease to be dis-
placed without good reasons, and large subsidies will be granted to

HOME AMD FOBEION AFFAIKS.

543

encourage instruction and science, because this is seen to be the source of
progress in European states. At all events the programme is attractive ;
but we may safely say that with elements such as the Sultan has at his
disposal, it is hopeless to think of carrying out such a programme. Still it
will be appealed to as a reply to the demands of the great Powers for
reform. The Powers will need a thorough understanding among them-
selves and unshaken firmness, in order to obtain the concessions that are
indispensable as a guarantee for the peace of the future.

The Italian ministry after prolonged hesitations have made up their
minds to dissolve the chambers. This is a serious event, and may
have very important consequences for the future of Italy. The dissolution
has been resolved upon, in view of a change which the present ministry
propose to introduce in the electoral system. The existing qualification is
forty francs. They design a considerable reduction of this qualification in
order to increase the electoral body and to produce a more active political
life in the country. They accuse the present electors of being indifferent,
and of not taking sufficient part and interest in electoral contests. We
are not yet informed what are to be the new franchises proposed by the
Nicotera ministry. Their bill will no sooner be passed, than there will
have to be a second dissolution, for the chamber cannot well continue to
hold power in face of a new electoral body from whom it docs not hold its
own commission. The Lower House will therefore only be summoned to
pass this single bill, and the ministry will not scruple in the use of all the
influence they possess, in order to secure a chamber of their own opinions.
Evidently it would have been more in the order of parliamentary usage to
have submitted the new franchise bill to the existing chambers, and then
have dissolved afterwards. But the ministry arc confronted by a conserva-
tive majority, and arc only kept in power by the aid of a Tuscan group,
which does not at all really belong to the left, and would desert the
Ministry if they ventured to propose reforms too radical. The lowering of
the qualification, if it is carried too far, may create serious difficulties in a
country, which is unified no doubt so far as national sentiment can produce
unity, but in which there still exist a host of elements of dissension and
even of dissolution. The present electoral body, in spite of its various
shades, is almost entirely devoted to the existing system.

It eent to the chamber barely a single representative of any of the
extreme parties — one or two clerical papists, scarcely any irreconcilable
republicans, and no socialists at all. Italy then had this enormous advan-
tage over France — that as in the case of long-established governments,
England for instance, the parties fought for power in the middle of the
parliament ; all moved and acted within the limits of the existing system,
and none aimed at the overthrow of the reigning dynasty. In France,
Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonaportists, and Republicans, all pursue different
ends that are wholly irreconcilable with one another. In Italy the great
national party comprehended all shades, who were represented in the
chamber. If they give the vote to the needier classes, even without going
so far as universal su&age, then it is to be feared that the extreme and

544

HOME AND FOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

irreeoncilable parties may take what must be at first a secondary place in
the parliament, but which will continually grow stronger. There are in
Italy numerous republican elements, though in a latent state. They have
been held down hitherto by two considerations. First, the king is per-
sonally very popular, and all the compliments that Signor Nicotera paid
him lately in his speech at Caserta are perfectly justified. In the second
place the republicans, Garibaldi, and Mazzini himself, understood that the
unity of Italy could only be brought about by means of the house of Savoy.
Thus they passed the word to refrain from attacks on the king and on
royalty. But now that unity is secured, and the country seems definitely
settled, these inducements to prudence will lose their force, and the impa-
tient will no longer be held back. On the other hand, the clerical and
anti-dynastic party grows and will go on growing. Already the Ministers
are alarmed by the rapid and truly extraordinary multiplication of convents,
and not many days ago they issued a circular, enjoining the rigorous appli-
cation of the mortmain laws. In this the ministry are probably on a false
track. The laws forbid the creation of corporate bodies, but they do not
forbid a group of persons, whether more or less numerous, from living
together, and having their property and the fruits of their industry in
common. The moment that freedom of association has been proclaimed
and respected, it is very difficult to binder the re-establishment of religious
corporations. If this is the object that the Italian government has in view,
it will have to make a law that must be very troublesome to draw up in such
away as to render it efficacious.

The reorganization of the forces of the clerical party is a fact that wrould
deserve a special study. It is being efiected in accordance with the design
that has already been executed in France and in Belgium, and that has suc-
ceeded so excellently in the latter of these two countries. First, there is the
spirit of the new generation of priests ; here is*a complete change. The Italian
priests were not in the least fanatical. They came of families of respectable
condition, and so shared the ordinary bourgeois ideas. At present most of
them are good patriots and very little inclined to become tools of the
Jesuits in destroying Italian unity. As a rule they do not meddle with
politics either in Uie pulpit or the confessional. They are gay, gonial, good
livers, smoke their cigars, go to the cafes, and sometimes even to the
theatre. They arc Italian citizens and not servitors of Rome. The young
priests who now come out of the seminaries are of an entirely different
stamp. As the priesthood is no longer in good esteem, and as the industrial
revival offers more lucrative openings to young men, the clergy are now
being recruited from the common people. The young Levite is therefore
not likely to keep up intellectual communication with his kinsfolk, who
have not the instruction necessary to enable them to understand him.
Thus he finds himself cut off from civil life, whose wants and aspirations ho
has ceased to share. At the seminary he is trained for the battle against
the ideas of the age, and on behalf of the re-conquest of supreme power for
the Church. He is thus the soldier of the Pope in the campaign against
the civil power. A curious thing, and one easy to foresee, though it has
been foreBeen by few, — the Pope^loss of temporal power has but made his

HOME AND FOBEIGN AFFAIB9.

. 645

spiritual power all the more formidable. Having nothing to lose or gam, he
^res everything. There is no longer any hold upon him. So long as he had
territory, he could be threatened. But what can be done against an old
man who has neither throne nor army ? Prince Bismarck urged Italy.to
abolish the Law of the Guarantees conceded to the papacy, but suppose
those laws abolished to-morrow, what will the Chancellor be able to do,
with all his million of men ? Nothing. He will be powerless against the
resistance of the aged pontiff. If he seizes his person, if he locks him
up in Spandau — ^he will only be increasing the prestige and the influence
of one who will henceforth be considered a martyr. What did Napoleon I.
gain by dragging Pius VII. from Savona to Fontainebleau ? It is to the
honour of humanity that force here becomes powerless. Henceforth, no
State, neither Germany nor Italy, can do battle with the papacy by guns
and bayonets. If governments would weaken its power, they must act on
men’s minds by education. What makes the power of the church irresis-
tible in catholic countries is the action which it exercises through the confes-
sional. It is thus that it obtains the gifts and the legacies by means of
which it will soon have acquired a fortune far more considerable than that
which the State has taken away from it. The present writer was one day
travelling with an Italian lady whose wit, eloquence and goodness have
charmed all who have ever visited her salon at Florence. She strove as
hard as she could to demonstrate that Italy was definitely liberated
from the yoke of the clergy. She appealed to her husband — a former col-
league of Cavour’s, and one of the most subtle political spirits of the Penin-
sula. I do not know,” ho answered, ** but look at our village : there used
to be one great monastery, peopled by lazy and indifferent monks. Unless
I am wrong in my arithmetic, we have now four small corporations, all
active, all intriguing, all collecting convertible securities in their safes, all
confessing the people, all receiving money with open hands, and all preparing
one day to be masters of the land.”

As you go through Italy, everybody will tell you that the clergy hold
aloof from politics, because as yet they have no power. But look a little
closer, and you will observe a thousand symptoms to prove that the clergy
are undergoing a transformation, that their influence is on the increase, and
that the monasteries are growing more numerous than they ever were. In
a short time, then, Italy will find herself face to face with the redoubtable
problem that has produced the Eulturkampf in Prussia. If you fight the
church openly as Prussia does, you raise a whole world of difficulties and
resistances. If, on the contrary, you grant it perfect freedom as in
Belgium, at the end of two or three generations it is the priest who has
become your absolute master. Count Arnim, who studied that difficult
question carefully and thoroughly while he represented Prussia at Borne,
said recently to the present writer : — La chiesa libera nelh stato disarmato
is a piece of dupery; at bottom it means this. La chma armata neUo
stato disarmato. The church can do everything against the state ; against
the church the state can do nothing. The only way of escaping from
embarrassment is for the great States to come to an understanding to
nominate a Pope with good sense. The appointment by a handful of

646 BOHX ABS FOBSION APfAIBS.

irresponsible Italian priests of a pontiff who has to direct the conscience
and the actions of all the Catholics in the world, and who is consequently
one of the strongest powers of the time, is a dangerous absurdity.*' The
anomaly is great indeed, no doubt ; but the remedy pointed out by Count
Amim seems wholly impracticable. The Catholics would never suffer a
pope nominated by the representatives of heretical or schismatic countries.
The pope will continue to be chosen by the cardinals, and as they count
a m^ority of Italians devoted to the Jesuits, the future pope will be
Italian and Jesuit.

The Spanish government have felt bound to give a pledge to the clergy in
the shape of an act of odious intolerance. They have forbidden protestants to
give notice of the hour of their services either by placard or advertisement
in the newspapers, on the plea that this is a public exercise of their
worship. On the same grounds a prefect even wont so far as to insist
on forbidding them to keep open the doors of their chapels, even while he
pretended to be respecting liberty of worship. England and Germany
made energetic representations at Madrid upon the subject. It is to be
hoped that Signor Canovas, who is the most distinguished man of the
Peninsula, will not go into the paths of reaction, for the sake of getting
clerical support. In all the great towns liberal ideas prevail, and even in
Andalusia and at Barcelona the majority has been gained over to the
republic. If therefore the Ministiy were to fall into a reactionary policy,
they must provoke a new revolution. The king is still young and has no
hard and fast intentions ; but at bottom he leans to liberalism. Only ihey
may hurry him into perilous ways. They are working hard to give him a
Jesuit confessor, and already the holy fathers have re-appeared in Spain and
have purchased one of their old convents.

France continues to enjoy her perfect calm and her enviable prosperity.
Ministers and deputies arc enjoying their villcgiatura, and the President
has accomplished a most satisfactory progress through an important part
of the country. He was received everywhere with acclamations of good
will. His popularity is growing greater and more general. The country
becomes more and more attached to its new institutions, and the President,
seeing that they give the country the repose of which it is still in need,
seems more determined than ever to defend and uphold them. Municipal
elections have just been held in 12,000 communes with the utmost order
and regularity. None of the apprehensions, expressed by the newspapers
and the writers of the old parties, were realised. Nor is this all. Except
in the districts where the vintage is going on, a very large number of
voters went to the poll. Political life is thus penetrating to the depthg of
the rural districts. Though the elections this year have been exceedingly
frequent, they have shown neither lassitude nor indifference. As a general
result, the moderate republicans have been victorious. As for eastern
aflSurs, France only takes an interest in them par acquit de conscience^ and
without bringing to them either real concern or definite ideas.

Sept, 27 , 1876 .

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW

No. CXIX. New Sebies.— Novembeb 1, 1876.

FERMENTATION, AND ITS BEARINGS ON THE
PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.^

Oke of the most remarkable characteristics of the age in which we
live, is its desire and tendency to connect itself organically with
preceding ages — ^to ascertain how the state of things that now is
came to he what it is. And the more earnestly and profoundly this
problem is studied, the more clearly comes into view the vast and
varied debt which the world of to-day owes to that fore-world, in
which man by skill, valour, and well-directed strength first reple-
nished and subdued the earth. Our pre-historic fathers may have
been savages, but they were clover and observant ones. They
founded agriculture by the discovery and development of seeds
whose origin is now unknown. They tamed and harnessed their
animal antagonists, and sent them down to us as ministers,
instead of rivals in the fight for life. Later on, when the claims
of luxury added themselves to those of necessity, we find the
same spirit of invention at work. Wo have no historic account of
the first brewer, but we glean from history that his art was practised,
and its produce relished, more than two thousand years ago.
Theophrastus, who was born nearly four hundred years before Christ,
described beer as f/ze fcizie of barley. It is extremely difiicult to
preserve beer in a hot country, still, Eg3rpt was the land in which
it was first brewed, the desire of man to quench his thirst with
this exhilarating beverage overcoming all the obstacles which a hot
climate threw in the way of its manufacture.

Our remote ancestors had also learned by experience that wine
maketh glad the heart of man. Noah, we are informed, planted a
vineyard, drank of the wine, and experienced the consequences.
But, though wine and beer possess so old a history, a very few
years ago no man knew the secret of their formation. Indeed, it

(1) A DifloouxBo delivered before the Glasgow Science Lectures Association, October
19th, 1876. *

VOL. XX. N.S.

V ^

548

ncsiunTTAiioir, and ns beabings

/■

miglit be said that until the present year no thorough and scientific
account ^as ever given of the agencies which come into play in
the manufacture of beer, of the conditions necessary to its health,
and of the maladies and vicissitudes to which it is subject.
Hitherto the art and practice of the brewer have resembled those
of the physician, both being founded on empirical observation. By
this is meant the observation of facts apart from the principles
which explain them, and which give the mind on intelligent
mastery over them. The brewer learnt from long experience the
conditions, not the reasons of success. But ho had to contend,
and he has still to contend, against unexplained perplexities. Over
and over again his care has been rendered nugatory ; his beer has
fallen into acidity or rottenness, and disastrous losses have been
sustained, of which he has been unable to assign the cause. It is the
hidden enemies against which the physician and the brewer have
hitherto contended, that recent researches are dragging into the
b'ght of day, thus preparing the way for their final extermination.

Let us glance for a moment at the outward and visible signs of
fermentation. A few weeks ago I paid a visit to a private
still in a Swiss chalet ; and this is what I saw. In the peasant’s
bedroom was a cask with a very large bunghole carefully
closed. The cask contained cherries 'which had lain in it for
fourteen days. It was not entirely filled with the fruit, an
air-space being left above the cherries wlien they were put in. I
had the bung removed, and a small lamp dipped into this space.
Its flame was instantly extinguished. The oxygen of the air had
entirely disappeared, its place being taken by carbonic acid gas.^ I
tasted the cherries : they were very sour, though when put into the
cask they were sweet. The cherries and the liquid associated
with them were then placed in a copper boiler, to which a copper
head was closely fitted. From the head proceeded a copper-tube
which passed straight through a vessel of cold water, alTd issued
at the other side. Under the open end of the tube was placed
a bottle to receive the spirit distilled. The flame of small wood-
' splinters being applied to the boiler, after a time vapour rose
into the head, passed through the tube, was condensed by the cold
of the water, and fell in a Uquid fillet into the bottle. On being
‘tasted, it proved to be that fiery and intoxicating spirit known in
commerce as Hirsch or Kirschwasser.

' The ch^nries, it should be remembered, were here left to themselves,
no ferment of any kind being added to them. In this respect what
bas'beeiL said of the cherry applies also to the grape. At the vintage
’ Ihe&tiit of the vine is placed in proper vessels, and abandoned to its

. {jL) Ibbe o>s whidi is sihalsd from the lungs aft»r the oxygen of the air has done its
duty in puriiyuig the Uood, the same also i?hich eServesoes from soda wSter and

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

549

own action. It ferments^ producing carbonic acid; its sweetness
disappears, and at the end of a certain time the unintoxicating
grape-juice is converted into intoxicating wine. Here, as in the
case of the cherries, the fermentation is spontaneous — ^in what sense
spontaneous will appear more clearly by-and-by.

It is needless for me to tell a Glasgow audience that the
beer-brewer does not set to work in this way. In the first
place the brewer deals not with the juice of fruits, but with the
juice of barley. The barley having boen steeped for a suffi-
cient time in water, it is drained, and subjected to a tempera-
ture sufficient to cause the moist grain to germinate ; after which,
it is completely dried upon a kiln. It then receives the name of
malt. The malt is crisp to the teeth, and decidedly sweeter to the
taste than the original barley. It is ground, mashed up in warm
water, then boiled with hops until all the soluble portions have been
extracted ; the infusion thus produced being called the wort. This is
drawn off, and cooled as rapidly as possible ; then, instead of
abandoning the infusion, as the wine-maker does, to its own action,
the brewer mixes yeast with his wort, and places it in vessels
each with only one aperture open to the air. Soon after the
addition of the yeast, a brownish froth, which is really new yeast,
issues from the aperture, and falls like a cataract into troughs
prepared to receive it. This frothing and foaming of the wort is
a proof that the fermentation is active.

Whence comes the yeast which issues so copiously from the
fermenting tub ? What is this yeast, and how did the brewer be-
come in the first instance possessed of it P Examine its quantity
before and after fermentation. The brewer introduces, say
10 cwts. of yeast ; he collects 40, or it may be 50 cwts. The yeast
has, therefore, augmented from four to five fold during the fer-
mentation. Shall we conclude that this additional yeast has been
spontaneously generated by the wort P Are we not rather reminded
of that seed which fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit,
some thirty fold, some sixty fold, some an hundred foldP On
examination tiiis notion of organic growth turns out to be more
than a mere surmise. In the year 1680, when the microscope
was still in its infancy, Leeuwenhoek turned the instrument
upon this substance, and found it composed of minute globules
suspended in a liquid. Thus knowledge rested until 1835, when
Oagniard de la Tour in France, and Schwann in Germany, inde-
pendently, but animated by a common thought, turned microscopes
of improved definition and heightened powers upon yeast, and
foimd it budding and sprouting before their eyes. The augmen-
tation pf the yeast alluded to above was thus proved to arise
from the growth of a minute plant, now called Torula (or Sac*

pp 2

550

FEBHENTATION, AND ITS BEABINQS

charomycei) CeremicB. Spontaneous generation is therefore out of
the question. The brewer deliberately sows the yeast-plant, which
grows and multiplies in the wort as its proper soil. This discovery
marks an epoch in the history of fermentation.

But where did the brewer find his yeast P The reply to this
question is similar to that which must be given if it were
asked where the brewer found his barley. He has received the
seeds of both of them from preceding generations. Gould we
connect without solution of continuity the present with the past,
we should probably be able to trace back the yeast employed by
my friend Sir Fowell Buxton to-day, to that employed by some
Egyptian brewer two thousand years ago. But you may urge
that there must have been a time when the first yeast cell was
generated. Granted — exactly as there was a time when the first
barley-corn was generated. Let not the delusion lay hold of you,
that a living thing is easily generated, because it is small. Both the
yeast-plant and the barley-plant lose themselves in the dim twilight
of antiquity, and in this our day there is no more proof of the
spontaneous generation of the one, than there is of the spontaneous
generation of the other.

I stated a moment ago that the fermentation of grape- juice was
spontaneous ; but 1 was careful to add, in what sense spontaneous
will appear more clearly by-and-by.” Now this is the sense meant.
The wine-maker does not, like the brewer and distiller, deliberately
introduce either yeast, or any equivalent of yeast, into his vats ; ho
does not consciously sow in them any plant, or the germ of any
plant ; indeed, he has been hitherto in ignorance whether plants or
germs of any kind have had anything to do with his operations.
Still, when the fermented grape-juice is examined, the living Torxda
concerned in alcoholic fermentation never fails to make its appear-
ance. How is this ? If no living germ has been introduced into the
wine-vat, whence comes the life so invariably developed thererf

You may be disposed to reply with Turpin and others, that in
virtue of its own inherent powers, the grape-juice when brought
into contact with the vivifying atmospheric oxygen, runs spontane-
ously and of its own accord into these low forms of life. I have
not the slightest objection to this explanation provided proper
evidence can be adduced in support of it. But the evidence
adduced in its favour, as far as I am acquainted with it, snaps
asunder under the least strain of scientific criticism. It is, as far as
I can see, the evidence of men, who, however keen and clever as
^ observers, are not rigidly trained experimenters^ These alone are aware
of the precautions necessary in investigations of this delicate kind. In
reference, then, to the Hfe of the wine- vat, what is the decision of ex-
periment when carried out by competent men ? Let a quantity of the

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

551

dear, filtered must of the grape be so boiled as to destroy such
germs as it may have contracted from the air or otherwise. In contact
with gormless air the uncontaminated must never ferments. AH the
materials for spontaneous generation are there^ but so long as there is
no seed sown there is no life developed^ and no sign of that fermenta-
tion which is the concomitant of life. Nor need you resort to a boiled
liquid. The grape is sealed by its own skin against contamination
from without. By an ingenious device Pasteur has extracted from
the interior of the grape its pure juice, and proved that in contact
with pure air it never acquires the power to ferment itself, nor to
produce fermentation in other liquids.^ It is not, therefore, in the
interior of the grape that the origin of the life observed in the vat
is to be sought.

What then is its true origin P This is Pasteur’s answer, which his
well-proved accuracy renders worthy of all confidence. At the time of
the vintage microscopic particles are observed adherent, both to the
outer surface of the grape and of the twigs which support the grape.
Brush these particles into a capsule of pure water. It is rendered
turbid by the dust. Examined by a microscope some of these
minute particles arc seen to present the appearance of organized cells.
Instead of receiving them in water, let them be brushed into the
pure inert juice of the grape. Forty-eight hours after this is done,
our familiar Torula is observed budding and sprouting, the growth
of the plant being accompanied by all the other signs of active fer-
mentation. What is the inference to be drawn from this experiment P
Obviously that the particles adherent to the external surface of the
grape include the germs of that life which, after they have been
sown in the juice, appears in such profusion. Wine is sometimes
objected to on the ground that fermentation is “artificial;” but
we notice here the responsibility of nature. The ferment of the grape
clings like a parasite to the surface of the grape, and the art of the wine-
maker from time immemorial has consisted in bringing — and it may -
be added, ignorantly bringing — two things thus closely associated by
nature into actual contact with each other. For thousands of years,
what has been done consciously by the brewer, has been done uncon-
sciously by the wine-grower. The one has sown his leaven just as
much as the other.

Nor is it necessary to impregnate the beer-wort with yeast to
provoke fermentation. Abandoned to the contact of our common air,
it sooner or later ferments ; but the chances are that the produce of
that fermentation, instca^f being agreeable, would be disgusting to
the taste. By a rare ao4|^nt we might get the true alcoholic fer-

(1) The liquids of the healthy animal body are also sealed from external contamina-
tion. Pure blood, for example, drawn with due precautions from the veins, will never
ferment or putrefy in contact with pure air.

^ flEBMSHTATION, Am m BEABINGS

mentation, but the odds against obtaining it would be enonnous.
Pure air acting upon a lifeless liquid will never provoke fermenta-
tion ; but our or^nary air is the vehicle of numberless germs which
act as ferments when they fall into appropriate infusions. Some
of them produce acidity, some putrefaction. The germs of our
yeast-plant are also in the air; but so sparingly distributed that
an infusion like beer- wort, exposed to the air, is almost sure to be
taken possession of by foreign organisms. In fact the maladies of
beer are wholly due to the admixture of these objectionable ferments,
whose forms and modes of nutrition differ materially from those of
the true leaven.

Working in an atmosphere charged with the germs of these orga-
nisms, you can understand how easy it is to fall into error in studying
the action of any one of them. Indeed it is only the most accom-
plished experimenter, who, moreover, avails himself of every means
of checking his conclusions, that can walk without tripping through
this land of pitfalls. Such a man is the French chemist Pasteur. He
has taught us how to separate the commingled ferments of our air, and
to study their pure individual action. Guided by him, let us fix our
attention more particularly upon the growth and action of the true
yeast-plant under different conditions. Let it be sown in a fer-
mentable liquid, which is supplied with plenty of pure air. The plant
will flourish in the aerated infusion, and produce large quantities of
carbonic acid gas — a compound, as you know, of carbon and oxygen.
The oxygen thus consumed by the plant is the free oxygen of the
air, which we suppose to bo abundantly supplied to the liquid.
The action is so far similar to the respiration of animals, which
inspire oxygen and expic# carbonic acid. If we examine the
liquid even when the vigour of the plant has reached its maximum,
we hardly find in it a trace of alcohol. The yeast has grown and
flourished, but it has almost ceased to act as a ferment. And could
every individual yeast cell seize, without any impedim^t, free
oxygen from the surrounding liquid, it is certain that it would
cease to act as a ferment altogether.

What, then, are the conditions under which the yeast-plant must
be placed so that it may display its characteristic quality P Reflec-
tion on the facts already referred to suggests a reply, and rigid
experiment confirms the suggestion. Consider the Alpine cherries
in their closed vessel. Consider the beer in its barrel, with
a single small aperture open to tho air, through which it is
observed not to imbibe oxygen, but to pour forth carbonic acid.
Whence come the volumes of oxygen necessary to the production of
this latter gas P The small quantity of atmospheric air dissolved in
the wort and overlying it would be totally incompetent to supply
the necessary oxygen. In no other way con the yeast-plant obta^

ON TEE PHBKOEEIIA. OF EISBASE.

558

the gas necessary for its respiration than by wrenching it from sur-
rounding substances, in which the oxygen exists, not free, but in a
state of combination. It decomposes the sugar of the solution in
which it grows, produces heat, breathes forth carbonic acid gas, and
one of the liquid products of the decomposition is our familiar
alcohol. Tho act of fermentation, then, is a result of the effort of
the little plant to maintain its respiration by means of combined
oxygen, when its supply of free oxygen is cut off. As defined by
Pasteur, fermentation is life without air.

But here the knowledge of that thorough investigator comes to
our aid to warn us against errors which have been committed over
and over again. It is not all yeast cells that can thus live without
air and provoke fermentation. They must be young cells which
have caught their vegetative vigour from contact with free oxygen.
But once possessed of this vigour the yeast may be transplanted
into a saccharine infusion absolutely purged of air, where it
will continue to live at the expense of the oxygen, carbon, and
other constituents of tho infusion. Under these new conditions its
life, due a plants wull be by no moans so vigorous as when it had a
supply of free oxygen, but its action as a ferment will be indefinitely
greater.

Does the yeast-plant stand alone in its power of provoking
alcoholic fermentation ? It would be singular if amid the multitude
of low vegetable forms no other could be found capable of acting in
a similar w'ay. And here again wc have occasion to marvel at that
sagacity of observation among the ancients to which we owe so vast
a debt. Not only did they discover tho alcoholic ferment of yeast,
but they had to exercise a wise selection in picking it out from
others, and giving it special prominence. Place an old boot in a
moist place, or expose common paste or a pot of jam to the air ;
it soon becomes coated with a blue-green mould, which is nothing
else than the fructification of a little plant called Penicillium glaucum.
Do not imagine that the mould has sprung spontaneously from boot,
or paste, or jam ; its germs, which are abundant in the air, have been
sown, and have germinated, in as legal and legitimate a way as
thistle-seeds wafted by the wind to a proper soil. Let the minute
spores of Penicillium be sown in a fermentable liquid, which has
been previously so boiled as to kill all other spores or seeds which
it may contain; let pure air have free access to the mixture;
the Penicillium will grow rapidly, striking long filaments into
the liquid, and fructifying at its surface. Test the infusion
at various stages of the plant’s growth, you will never find
in it a trace of alcohol. But forcibly submerge the little plant,
push it down deep into tho liquid, where the quantity of free
oxygen that can reach it is insufficient for its needs, it imme-

564

FERMENTATION, AND ITS BEARINGS

diately begins to act as a ferment, supplying itself with oxygen
by the decomposition of the sugar, and producing alcohol as one of
the results of the decomposition. Many other low microscopic plants
act in a similar manner. In aerated liquids they flourish without any
production of alcohol, but cut off from free oxygen they act as fer-
ments, producing alcohol exactly as the real alcoholic leaven produces
it, only less copiously. For the right apprehension of all these facts
we are indebted to Pasteur.

In the cases hitherto considered, the fermentation is proved to
be the invariable correlative of life^ being produced by organisms
foreign to the fermentable substance. But the substance itself may
also have within it, to some extent, the motive power of fermenta-
tion. The yeast-plant, as we have learned, is an assemblage of
living cells ; but so at bottom, as shown by Schleidcn and Schwann,
are all living organisms. Cherries, apples, peaches, pears, plums,
and grapes, for example, are composed of cells, each of which is a
living unit. And here I have to direct your attention to a point of
extreme interest. In 1821, the celebrated French chemist, Berard,
established the important fact that all ripening fruit, exposed to
the free atmosphere, absorbed the oxygen of the atmosphere
and liberated an approximately equal volume of carbonic acid.
He also found that when ripe fruits were placed in a confined
atmosphere, the oxygen of the atmosphere was first absorbed, and an
equal volume of carbonic acid given out. But the process did not
end here. After the oxygen had vanished, carbonic acid, in con-
siderable quantities, continued fo be exhaled by the fruits, which at
the same time lost a portion of their sugar, becoming more acid to
the taste, though the absolute quantity of acid was not augmented.
This was an observation of capital importance, and Berard had the
sagacity to remark that the process might be regarded as a kind of
fermentation.

Thus the living cells of fruits can absorb oxygen and brOAthe out
carbonic acid, exactly like the living cells of the leaven of beer.
Supposing the access of oxygen suddenly cut off, will the living
fruit-cells as suddenly die, or will they continue to live as yeast
lives, by extracting oxygen from the saccharine juices round
them? This is a question of extreme theoretic significance. It
was first answered afiirmatively by the able and conclusive
experiments of Lechartier and BeUomy, and the answer was
subsequently confirmed and explained by the experiments and
the reasoning of Pasteur. Berard only showed the absorption of
oxygen and the production of carbonic acid ; Lechartier amd Bel-
lamy proved the production of alcohol, thus completing the evidence
that it lyas a case of real fermentation, though the common tdcoholic
Ibrment was absent. So full was Pasteur of the idea that the cells of a

ON THE PHENOMENA OP DISEASE.

555

fruit would continue to live at the expense of the sugar of the fruity
that once in his laboratory, while conversing on these subjects with
M. Dumas, he exclaimed, will wager that if a grape be plunged
into an atmosphere of carbonic acid, it will produce alcohol and
carbonic acid by the continued life of its own cells — ^that they will act
for a time like the cells of the true alcoholic leaven/’ He made the
experiment, and found the result to be what he had foreseen. He then
extended the inquiry. Placing under a bell-jar twenty-four plums,
he filled the jar with carbonic acid gas ; beside it he placed twenty-
four similar plums uncovered. At the end of eight days he removed
the plums from the jar, and compared them with the others. The
difference was extraordinary. The uncovered fruits had become soft,
watery, and very sweet ; the others were firm and hard, their fleshy
portions being not at all watery. They had, moreover, lost a con-
siderablo quantity of their sugar. They were afterwards bruised,
and the juice was distilled. It yielded six and a half grammes of
alcohol, or one per cent, of the total weight of the plums. Neither
in these plums, nor in the grapes first experimented on by Pasteur,
could any trace of the ordinary alcoholic leaven be found. As
previously proved by Lecharticr and Bellamy, the fermentation
was the work of the living cells of the fruit itself, after air had
been denied to them. When moreover the cells were destroyed
by bruising, no fermentation ensued. The fermentation was the
correlative of a vital act, and it ceased when life was extinguished.

Liidersdorf was the first to show by this method that yeast acted,
not, as Liebig had assumed, in virtue of its organic^ but in virtue of
its organised character. He destroyed the colls of yeast by rubbing
them on a ground glass plate, and found that with the destruction
of the organism, though its chemical constituents remained, the
power to act as a ferment totally disappeared.

One word more in reference to Liebig may find a place here.
To the philosophic chemist thoughtfully pondering these phe-
nomena, familiar with the conception of molecular motion, and the
changes produced by the interactions of purely chemical forces,
nothing could be more natural than to see in the process of fermenta-
tion a simple illustration of molecular instability, the ferment pro-
pagating to surrounding molecular groups the overthrow of its
own tottering combinations. Broadly considered, indeed, there is a
certain amount of truth in this theory ; but Liebig, who pro-
pounded it, missed the very kernel of the phenomena when he over-
looked or contemned the part played in fermentation by microscopic
life. He looked at the matter too little with the eye of the body,
and too much with the spiritual eye. He practically neglected the
microscope, and was unmoved by the knowledge which its revela-
tions would have poured in upon his mind. His hypothesis, as I

556

EEBMSKTATi;OK, ASB ITS BEARINGS ,

have said, was natural — ^nay, it was a striking illustration of Liebig’s
power to penetrate and unveil molecular actions; but it was an
error, and as such has proved an ignis fatum instead of a pharos to
some of his followers.

I have said that our air is full of the germs of ferments
differing from the alcoholic leaven, and sometimes seriously
interfering with the latter. They are the weeds of this micro-
scopic garden which often overshadow and choke the flowers.
Let us take an illustrative case. Expose boiled milk to the
air. It will cool, and then turn sour, separating like blood into
clot and serum. Place a drop of this sour milk under a powerful
microscope and watch it closely. You see the minute butter-
globules animated by that curious quivering motion called the
Brownian motion.^ But let not this attract your attention too much,
for it is another motion that we have now to seek. Here and there
you observe a greater disturbance than ordinary among the globules ;
keep your eye upon the place of tumult, and you will probably sec
emerging from it a long eel-Uke organism, tossing the globules aside
and wriggling more or less rapidly across the field of the microscope.
Familiar with one sample of this organism, which from its motions
receives the name of vibrio, you soon detect numbers of them. It is
these organisms, and other analogous though apparently motionless
ones, which by decomposing the milk render it sour and putrid. They
are the lactic and putrid ferments, as the yeast-plant is the alcoholic
ferment of sugar. Seep them and their germs out of your milk and
it will continue sweet. But milk may become putrid without becoming
sour. Examine such putrid milk microscopically, and you find it
swarming with shorter organisms, sometimes associated with the
vibrios, sometimes alone, and often manifesting a wonderful alacrity
of motion. Keep these organisms and their germs out of your milk
and it will never putrify. Expose a mutton-chop to the air oiid keep
it moist ; in summer weather it soon stinks. Place a drop of the juice
of the fetid chop under a powerful microscope ; it is seen swarming
with organisms resembling those in the putrid milk. These organ-
isms, which receive the common name of bacteria,^ are the agents of
all putrefaction. Keep them and their germs from your meat and it
will remain for ever sweet. Thus we begin to sec that within the
world of life to which wo ourselves belong, there is another living
world requiring the microscope for its discernment, but which,
nevertheless, has the most important bearing on the welfare of the
higher life-world.

(1) Which I am inclined to regard as an effect of surface tension.

(2} Doubtless organisnLS exhibiting grave specific differences are grouped together
under this oommon name.

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

567

And now let us reason together as regards the origin of these
bacteria. A granular powder is placed in your hands, and you are
asked to state what it is. Tou examine it, and have, or have not,
reason to suspect that seeds of some kind are mixed up in it. But
you prepare a bed in your garden, sow in it the powder, and soon
after find a mixed crop of docks and thistles sprouting from your
bed. Until this powder was sown neither docks nor thistles ever
made their appearance in your garden. You repeat the experiment
once, twice, ten times, fifty times. From fifty different beds after
the sowing of the powder you obtain the same crop. What will be
your response to the question proposed to you P I am not in a
condition,’^ you would say, “ to affirm that every grain of the powder
is a dock-seed or a thistle-seed ; but I am in a condition to affirm
that both dock and thistle-seeds form, at all events, part of the
powder.” Supposing a succession of such powders to be placed in
your hands with grains becoming gradually smaller, until they
dwindle to the size of impalpable dust particles ; assuming that you
treat them all in the same way, and that from every one of them in
a few days you obtain a definite crop — it may be clover, it may be
mustard, it may be mignonette, it may be a plant more minute than
any of these, the smallness of the particles, or of the plants that
spring from them, does not affect the validity of the conclusion.
Without a shadow of misgiving you would conclude that the powder
must have contained the seeds or germs of the life observed. There
is not in the range of physical science an experiment more conclusive
nor an inference safer than this one.

Supposing the powder to be light enough to float in the air, and
that you are enabled to see it there just as plainly as you saw the
heavier powder in the palm of your hand. If the dust sown by the
air instead of by the hand produce a definite living crop, with the
same logical rigour you would conclude that the germs of this crop
must be mixed with the dust. To take an illustration : the spores
of the little plant Tenicillium glamum^ to which I have already
referred, are light enough to float in the air. A cut apple, a pear, a
tomato, a slice of vegetable marrow, or, as already mentioned, an old
moist boot, a dish of paste, or a pot of jam, constitutes a proper
soil for the PenkilUum. Now, if it could be proved that the dust
of the air when so^vn in this soil produces this plant, while, wanting
the dust, neither the air nor the soil, nor both together, can produce
it, it would be obviously just as certain in this case that the floating
dust contains the germs of Penicillium as that the powders sown in
your garden contained the germs of the plants which sprung from
them.

But how is the floating dust to be rendered visible ? In this way.
Build a little chamber and provide it with a door, windows, and

558

FERMENTATION, AND ITS BEARINGS

window-sliutters. Let an aperture be xnade in one of the shutters
through. which a sunbeam can pass. Close the door and windows
so that no lig^t shall enter save through the hole in the shutter.
The track of the sunbeam is at first perfectly plain and vivid in
the air of the room. If all disturbance of the aii'‘ of the chamber
be avoided, the luminous track will become fainter and fainter,
until at last it disappears absolutely, and no trace 'of the beam
is to be seen. What rendered the beam visible at first P The
floating dust of the air, which, thus illuminated and observed,
is as palpable to sense as any dust or powder placed on the palm of
the hand. In the still air the dust gradually sinks to the floor or
sticks to the walls and ceiling, until finally, by this self-cleansing
process, the air is entirely freed from mechanically suspended
matter.

Thus far, I think, we have made our footing sure. Let us proceed.
Chop up a beefsteak and allow it to remain for two or three hours just
covered with warm water ; you thus extract the juice of the beef in a
concentrated form. By properly boiling the liquid and filtering it you
can obtain from it a perfectly transparent beef-tea. Expose a number
of vessels containing this tea to the moteless air of your chamber ; and
expose a number of similar vessels containing precisely the same liquid
to the dust-laden air. In three days every one of the latter stinks,
and examined with the microscope every one of them is found swarm-
ing with the bacteria of putrefaction. After three months, or three
years, the beef-tea within the chamber is found in every case as
sweet and clear, and as free from bacteria as it was at the moment
when it was first put in. There is absolutely no difference between
the air within and that without save that the one is dustless and
the other dust-laden. Clinch the experiment thus: Open the
door of your chamber and allow the dust to enter it. In three days
afterwards you have every vessel within the chamber swarming with
bacteria, and in a state of active putrefaction. Here, "also, the
inference is quite as certain as in the case of the powder sown in
your garden. Multiply your proofs by building fifty chambers
instead of one, and by employing every imaginable infusion of wild
animals and tame ; of flesh, fish, fowl, and viscera ; of vegetables of
the most various kinds. If in all these cases you find the dust
infallibly producing its crop of bacteria, while neither the dustless
air nor the nutritive infusion, nor both together, are ever able to
produce this crop, your conclusion is simply irresistible that the
dust of the air contains the germs of the crop which has appeared
in your infusions. I repeat there is no inference of experimental
science more certain than this one. In the presence of such
ikets, jao use the words of a paper lately published in the
Philosophical Transactions,’^ it would be simply monstrous to

ON THE PHENOMENA OP DISEASE.

559

affirm that these swarming crops of bacteria are spontaneously

then no experimental proof of spontaneous generation P
I answer without hesitation^ none / But to doubt the experimental
proof of a fact, and to deny its possibility, are two different things,
though some writers confuse matters by making them synonymous.
In fact, this doctrine of spontaneous generation, in one form or
another, falls in with the theoretic beliefs of some of the foremost
workers of this age ; but it is exactly these men who have the pene-
tration to sec, and the honesty to expose, the weakness of the
evidence adduced in its support.

And here observe how these discoveries tally with the common
practices of life. Heat kills the bacteria, cold numbs them.
When my housekeeper has pheasants in charge which she wishes
to keep sweet, but which threaten to give way, she partially
cooks the birds, kills the infant bacteria, and thus postpones
the evil day. By boiling her milk she also extends its period of
sweetness. Some weeks ago in the Alps I made a few experiments
on the influence of cold upon ants. Though the sun was strong,
patches of snow still maintained themselves on the mountain slopes.
The ants were found in the warm grass and on the warm rocks adja-
cent. Transferred to the snow the rapidity of their paralysis was
surprising. In a few seconds a vigorous ant, after a few languid
struggles, would wholly lose its power of locomotion and lie practically
dead upon the snow. Transferred to the warm rock it would revive,
to be again smitten with death-like numbness when retransferred to
the snow. What is true of the ant is specially true of our bacteria.
Their active life is suspended by cold, and with it their power of
producing or continuing putrefaction. This is the whole philosophy
of the preservation of meat by cold. The fishmonger, for example,
when he surrounds his very assailable wares by lumps of ice, stays
the process of putrefaction by reducing to numbness and inaction
the organisms which produce it, and in the absence of which his fish
would remain sweet and sound. It is the astonishing activity
into which these bacteria arc pushed by warmth that renders a
single summer’s day sometimes so disastrous to the great butchers
of London and Glasgow. The bodies of guides lost in the crevasses of
Alpine glaciers have come to the surface forty years after their inter-
ment, without the flesh showing any sign of putrefaction. But the most
astonishing case of this kind is that of the hairy elephant of Siberia
which was found incased in ice. It had been buried for ages, but
when laid bare its flesh was sweet, and for so^e time afforded copious
nutriment to the wild beasts which fed upon it.

Beer is assailable by all the organisms here referred to, some of

generated.
Is there

660

PEBMENTATION, AlO) ITS BEABINGS

wliioh produce acetic, some lactic, and some butyric acid, ^bile
yeast is open to attack from the bacteria of putrefaction. In
relation to the particular beverage the brewer wishes to produce,
these foreign ferments have been properly called fermenta of disease.
The cells of the true leaven are globules, usually somewhat elon-
gated. The other organisms are more or less rod-like or eel-like
in shape, some of them being beaded so as to resemble necklaces.
Each of these organisms produces a fermentation and a flavour
peculiar to itself. Keep them out of your beer and it remains for
over imaltered, Never without them will your beer contract
disease. But their germs arc in the air, in the vessels employed in
the brewery ; even in the yeast used to impregnate tho wort. Con-
sciously or unconsciously, the art of the brewer is directed against
them. His aim is to paralyze if he cannot annihilate them.

For beer, moreover, the question of temperature is one of supreme
importance ; indeed the recognised influence of temperature is causing
on the continent of Europe a complete revolution in the manufacture
of beer. When I was a student in Berlin, in 1851, there were
certain places specially devoted to the sale of Bavarian beer, which
was then making its way into public favour. This beer is prepared
by what is called the process of low fermentation ; tho name being
given partly because tho yeast of the beer, instead of rising to the
top and issuing through the bunghole, falls to the bottom of the
cask ; but partly, also, because it is produced at a low temperature.
The other and older process, called high fermentation^ is far more
handy, expeditious, and cheap. In high fermentation eight days
suffice for the production of the beer; in low fermentation, ten,
fifteen, even twenty days are found necessary. Vast quantities of
ice, moreover, are consumed in the process of low fermentation. In
the single brewery of Dreher, of Vienna, a hundred million
pounds of ice are consumed annually in cooling the wort and beer.
Notwithstanding these obvious and weighty drawbacksj the low
fermentation is rapidly displacing the high upon the continent.
Here are some statistics which show the number of breweries of both
kinds existing in Bohemia in 1860, 1865, and 1870 : —

1860.

1870.

High Fermentation

,

281

81

18

Low Fermentation

,

135

469

831

Thus in ten years the number of high-fermentation breweries fell
from 281 to 18, while the number of low-fermentation breweries
rose from 135 to 831. The sole reason for this vast change — ^a
change which involves a greater expenditure of time, labour, and
money— is the additional command which it gives the brewer over
the fortuitous ferments of diseases These ferments, which, it is to
he'remembered, are living oeganisms, have their activity suspended

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

561

by temperatures below 10° C., and as long as they are reduced to
torpor the beer remains untainted either by acidity or putrefaction.
The beer of low fermentation is brewed in winter, and kept in cool
cellars ; the brewer being thus enabled to dispose of it at his leisure,
instead of forcing its consumption to avoid the loss involved in its
alteration if kept too long. Hops, it may be remarked, act to some
extent as an antiseptic to beer. The essential oil of the hop is
bactericidal : hence the strong impregnation with hop juice of all
beer intended for exportation.

These low organisms, which one might be disposed to regard as
the beginnings of life, wore we not warned that the microscope,
precious and perfect as it is, has no power to show us the real begin-
nings of life, are by no means purely useless or purely mischievous
in the economy of nature. They are only noxious when out of their
proper place. They exercise a useful and valuable function as the
burners and consumers of dead matter, animal and vegetable, reducing
such matter, with a rapidity otherwise unattainable, to innocent
carbonic acid and w'ater. Furthermore, they are not aU alike, and it
is only restricted classes of them that are really dangerous to man.
One difference in their habits is worthy of special reference here.
Air, or rather the oxygen of the air, which is absolutely necessary to
the support of the bacteria of putrefaction, is absolutely deadly to
the vibrios which provoke the butyric acid fermentation. This is
most simply illustrated by the following beautiful observation of
Pasteur. You know the way of looking at these small organisms
through the microscope. A drop of the liquid containing them is
placed upon glass, and on the drop is placed a circle of exceedingly
thin glass ; for, to magnify them suflSciently, it is necessary that the
microscope should come very close to the organisms. Bound the
edge of the circular plate of glass the liquid is in contact with the
air, and incessantly absorbs it, including the oxygen. Here, if the
drop be charged with bacteria, we have a zone of very lively ones.
But through this living zone, greedy of oxygen and appropriating
it, the vivifying gas cannot penetrate to the centre of the film. In
the middle, therefore, the bacteria die, while their peripheral col-
leagues continue active. If a bubble of air chance to be enclosed in
the film, rofUnd it the bacteria will pirouette and wabble until its
oxygen has been absorbed, after which all their motions cease.
Precisely the reverse of all this occurs with the vibrios of butyric
acid. In their case it is the peripheral organisms that are first
killed, the central ones remaining vigorous while rmged by a zone
of dead. Pasteur, moreover, filled two vessels with a liquid con-
taining these vibrios ; through one vessel he led air, and killed its
vibrios in half an hour ; through the other he led carbonio acid, and
after three hours found the vibrios fully active. It was while

562

FEBMEKTATION, ABD.ITS BEABIKOS

observing these differences of deportment fifteen years ago that the
thought of life without air, and its bearing upon the theory of
fermentation, fiashed upon the mind of this admirable investigator.

And here I am tempted to inquire how it is that during the last
five or six years so many of the cultivated English and American pub-
lic, including members of the medical profession and contributors to
some of our most intellectual journals, could be so turned aside as
they have been from the pure well-spring of scientific truth to be
found in the writings of Pasteur P The reason I take to be, that
while against unsound logic a healthy mind con always defend itself,
against unsound experiment, without discipline it is defenceless. To
judge of the soundness of scientific data, and to reason from data
assumed to be sound, are tw^o totally difierent things. The one
deals with the raw material of fact, the other with the logical
textures woven from that material. Now the logical loom may go
accurately through all its motions, while the woven fibres may be
all rotten. It is this inability, through lack of education in experi-
ment, to judge of the soundness of experimental work, which lies at
the root of the defection from Pasteur.

I will cite an example of this mistake of judgment. Between
the large-type articles and the reviews of the Saturday Review
essays on various subjects are interpolated. In the calm of holiday
evenings, while reading these brief essays, I have been many a time
impressed, not only with their sparkling cleverness, but with their
deep-searching wisdom and their wealth of spiritual experience.
In this central region of the Beview the question of spontaneous
generation has been taken up and discussed. The writer is not a whit
behind bis colleagues in literary brilliancy and logical force. But
having no touchstone in his own experience to enable him to distin-
guish a good experiment from a bad one, he has, on a point of the
gravest practical import, committed the influence of the powerful
journal in which he writes to the support of error. It is only, I
would repeat, by practice among facts that the intellect is prepared
to judge of facts, and no mere logical acuteness or Uterary skill can
atone for the want of this necessary education.

We now approach an aspect of this question which concerns us
still more closely, and which will be best illustrated by an actual
fact. A few years ago I was bathing in ah Alpine stream, and
returning to my clothes from the cascade which had been my shower-
bath, I slipped upon a block of granite, the sharp crystals of
which stamped themselves into my naked shin. The wound was
an awkward one, but being in vigorous health at the time, I
h^^^for a speedy recovery. Dipping a clean pocket handkerchief
iMS the stream, I wrapped it round the wound, limped home, and

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

563

remained for four or five days quietly in bed. There was no pain,
and at the end of this time I thought myself quite fit to quit my
room. The wound, when uncovered, was found perfectly clean,
uninflamed, and entirely free from matter. Placing over it a bit
of goldbeater’s-skin, I walked about all day. Towards evening
itching and heat were felt ; a large accumulation of matter followed,
and I was forced to go to bed again. The water-bandage was
restored, but it was powerless to check the action now set up;
arnica was applied, but it made matters worse. The inflammation
increased alarmingly, until finally I was ignobly carried on men’s
shoulders down the mountain and transported to Geneva, where,
thanks to the kindness of friends, I was immediately placed in the
best medical hands. On the morning after my arrival in Geneva,
Dr. Gautier discovered an abscess in my instep, at a distance of five
inches from the wound. The two were connected by a channel, or
BinuB, as it is technically called, through which he was able to
empty the abscess, without the application of the lance.

By what agency was that channel formed — ^what was it that thus
tore asunder the sound tissue of my instep, and kept me for six
weeks a prisoner in bed? In the very room where the water-
dressing had been removed from my wound and the goldbeater’ s-
skin applied to it, I opened this year a number of tubes, containing
perfectly clear and sweet infusions of fish, flesh, and vegetable.
These hermetically sealed infusions had been exposed for weeks, both
to the sun of the Alps and to the warmth of a kitchen, without
showing the slightest turbidity or sign of life. But two days after
they were opened the greater number of them swarmed with the
bacteria of putrefaction, the germs of which had been contracted
from the dust-laden air of the room. And had the matter from my
abscess been examined, my memory of its appearance leads me to
infer that it would have been found equally swarming with these
bacteria — ^that it was their germs which got into my incautiously-
opened wound, and that they were the subtle workers that burrowed
down my shin, dug the abscess in my instep, and produced efiects
which might well have proved fatal to me.

We here come face to face with the labours of a man who has
established for himself an imperishable reputation in relation to
this subject, who combines the penetration of the true theorist with
the skill and conscientiousness of the true experimenter, and whose
practice is one continued demonstration of the theory that the
putrefaction of wounds is to be averted by the destruction of tho
germs of bacteria. Not only from his own reports of his cabes,
but from the reports of eminent men who have visited his hospital,
and from the opinions expressed to me by continental surgeons, do
I gather that one of the greatest steps ever made in the art of

VOL. XX. N.S. Q Q

564 FERMENTATION, AND ITS BEARINGS

surgery was the introduction of the antiseptic system of treatmmit,
practised, first in Glasgow, and now in Edinburgh by Professor
Lister.

The interest of this subject does not slacken as wc proceed. We
began with the cherry-cask and beer- vat ; we end with the body of
man. There are persons bom with the power of interpreting natural
facts, as there are others smitten with everlasting incompetence in
regard to such interpretation. To the former class in an eminent
degree belonged the celebrated philosopher Robert Boyle, whose
words in relation to this subject have in them the forecast of pro-
phesy. “ And let me add,” writes Boyle in his “ Essay on the
Pathological Part of Physik,” " that he that thoroughly understands
the nature of ferments and fermentations shall probably be much
better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of
divers phenomena of several diseases (as well fevers as others) which
will perhaps be never properly understood without an insight into
the doctrine of fermentations.”

Two hundred years have passed since these pregnant words were
written, and it is only in this our day that men are beginning to
fully realise their truth. In the domain of surgery the justice
of Boyle’s surmise has been most strictly demonstrated. Demon-
stration is indeed the only word which fitly characterises the
-evidence brought forward by Professor Lister. You will grasp
in a moment his leading idea. Take the extracted juice of beef
or mutton, so prepared as to be perfectly transparent, and
entirely free from the living germs of bacteria. Into the clear
liquid let fall the tiniest drop of an infusion charged with the
bacteria of putrefaction. Twenty-four hours subsequently the clear
extract will be found muddy throughout, the turbidity being due to
swarms of bacteria generated by the drop with which the infusion
was inoculated. At the same time the infusion will have passed from
a state of sweetness to a state of putridity. Let a drop similar to
that which has produced this effect fall into an open wound : the
juices of the living body nourish the bacteria as the beef or mutton
juice nourished them, and you have putrefaction produced within
the system. The air, as I have said, is laden with fioating matter
which, when it falls upon the wound, acts substantially like the drop.
Professor Lister’s aim is to destroy the life of that fioating matter —
to kill such germs as it may contain. Had he, for example, dressed
my wound, instead of opening it incautiously in the midst of air
laden with the germs of bacteria, and instead of applying to it
goldbeater’s-skin, which probably carried these germs upon its sur-
face, he would have showered upon the wound, during the time of
dressing, the spray of some liquid capable of killing the germs.
The liquid usually employed for this purpose is dilute carbolic acid.

ON THE PHENOMENA OP DISEASE. 565

whichi in his skilled hands, has become a specific against putrefac-
tion and all its deadly consequences.

now pass the bounds of surgery proper, and enter the domain
of epidemic disease, including those fevers so sagaciously referred to
by Boyle. The most striking analogy between a contagium and a
ferment is to be found in the power of indefinite self-multiplication
possessed and exercised by both. You know the exquisitely truthful
figures regarding leaven employed in the New Testament. A
particle hid in three measures of meal leavens it all. A little
leaven leaveneth the whole lump. In a similar manner a particle of
contagium spreads through the human body and may be so multiplied
as to strike down whole populations. Consider the effect produced
upon the systqm by a microscopic quantity of the virus of smallpox.
That virus is to all intents and purposes a seed. It is sown
as yeast is sown, it grows and multiplies as yeast grows and
multiplies, and it always reproduces itself. To Pasteur we are
indebted for a scries of masterly researches, wherein he exposes the
looseness and general baselessness of prevalent notions regarding the
transmutation of one ferment into another. He guards himself
against saying it is impossible. The true investigator is sparing in
the use of this word, though the use of it is unsparingly ascribed to
him ; but, as a matter of fact, Pasteur has never been able to effect
the alleged transmutation, while he has been always able to point
out the open doorways through wliich the aifirmers of such trans-
mutations had allowed error to march in upon them.^

The great source of error here has been already alluded to in this*
discourse. The observers worked in an atmosphere charged with
the germs of different organisms : the mere accident of first posses-
sion rendering now one organism, now another, triumphant. In
different stages, moreover, of its fermentative or putrefactive
changes, the same infusion may so alter ns to be successively taken
possession of by different organisms. Sueh cases have been Educed
to show that the earlier organisms must have been transformed into
the later ones, whereas they are simply cases in which different
germs, because of changes in the infiision, render themselves valid
at different times. ^

By teaching us how to cultivate each ferment in its purity, — ^in
other words, by teaching us how to rear the individual organism
apart from all others, — ^Pasteur has enabled us to avoid all these
errors. And where this isolation of a particular organism has been
duly effected it grows and multiplies indefinitely, but no change of

(1) Those who wish for an illustration of the care necessary in those xesearohes, and
of the carelessness with which they have in some cases been conducted, will do well to
consult the Bev. W. H. DalHnger's excellent, ** Notes on Hetero^^esis " in the
October number of the I^ipuUir SHwee Meview,

Q Q 2

566 FEJEtMENTATION, AND ITS BEABINGS

it into another organism is ever observed. In Pasteur’s researches
the Bacterium remained a Bacterium^ the Yibrio a Vibrio, the Peni*
cillium a Penicillium, and the Torula a Torula. Sow any of these in
a state of purity in an appropriate liquid ; you get it, and it alone^
in the subsequent crop. In like manner, sow small-pox in the
human body, your crop is small-pox. Sow there scarlatina, and
your crop is scarlatina. Sow typhoid virus, your crop is typhoid-
cholera, your crop is cholera. The disease bears as constant a rela-
tion to its contagium as the microscopic organisms just enumerated
do to their germs, or indeed as a thistle does to its seed. No
wonder, then, with analogies so obvious and so striking, that the
conviction is spreading and growing daily in strength that repro-
ductive parasitic life is at the root of epidemic disease — ^that living
ferments finding lodgment in the body increase there and multiply,
directly ruining the tissue on which they subsist, or destroying life
indirectly by the generation of poisonous compounds within the
body. This conclusion, which comes to us with a presumption
almost amounting to demonstration, is clinched by the fact that
virulently infective diseases have been discovered with which living
organisms arc as closely and as indissolubly associated as the growth
of Torula is with the fermentation of beer.

And here, if you will permit me, I would utter a word of warning
to well-meaning people. We have now reached a phase of this
question when it is of the very last importance that light should
once for all be thrown upon the manner in which contagious and
infectious diseases take root and spread. To this end the action of
various ferments upon the organs and tissues of the living body must
bo studied ; the habitat of each special 'organism concerned in the
production of each specific disease must be determined, and the mode
by which its germs are spread abroad as sources of further infection.
It is only by such rigidly accurate inquiries that we can obtain final
and complete mastery over these destroyers. Hence, while abhor-
ring cruelty of all kinds, while shrinking sympathetically from all
animal sufiering— suffering which my own pursuits never call upon
me to infiict, an unbiassed survey of the field of research now opening
out before the physiologist causes me to conclude, that no greater cala-
mity could befall the human race than the stoppage of experimental
i:^quiry in this direction. A lady whose philanthropy has rendered
her illustrious said to me some time ago, that science was becoming
immoral ; that the researches of the past, unlike those of the present,
w;ere carried on without cruelty. I replied to her that the science
of Kepler and Newton, to which she referred, dealt with the laws
and phenomena of inorganic nature ; but that one great advance
made by modern science was in the direction of biology, or the

ON THE PHENOMENA OP DISEASE.

667

science of life ; and tHat in this new direction scientific inquiry,
though at the outset pursued at the cost of some temporary suffering,
would in the end prove a thousand times more beneficent than it had
ever hitherto been. I said this because I saw that the very researches
which the lady deprecated were leading us to such a knowledge of
epidemic diseases, as will enable us finally to sweep these scourges of
the human race from the face of this fair earth.

This is a point of such special importance that I should like to
bring it home to your intelligence by a single trustworthy illustra-
tion. In 1850, two distinguished French observers, MM. Davainne
and Bayer, noticed in the blood of animals which had died of the
virulent disease called splenic /every small microscopic organisms
resembling transparent rods, but neither of them at that time
attached any significance to the observation. In 1861, Pasteur pub-
lished a memoir on the fermentation of butyric acid, wherein he
described the organism which provoked it ; and after reading this
memoir it occurred to Davainne that splenic fever might be a case of
fermentation set up within the animal body, by the organisms which
had been observed by him and Bayer. This idea has been placed
beyond all doubt by subsequent research.

Some years in advance of the labours undertaken by Davainne,
observations of the highest importance had been made on
splenic fever by Pollcnder and BraucU. Two years ago, Dr.
Burdon Sanderson gave us a very clear account of what was
.known up to that time of this disorder. With regard to the
permanence of the contagium, it had been proved to hang for
years about localities where it had once prevailed ; and this seemed
to show that the rod-like organisms could not constitute the
contagium, because their infective power was found to vanish in
a few weeks. But other facts established an intimate connection
between the organisms and the disease, so that a review of all the
facts caused Dr. Sanderson to conclude that the contagium existed in
two distinct forms : the one fugitive and visible as transparent
rods ; the other permanent but latent,’’ and not yet brought
within the grasp of the microscope.

At the time that Dr. Sanderson was writing this report, a young
German physician, named Koch, occupied with the duties of his
profession in an obscure country district, was already at work,
applying, during his spare time, various original and ingenious
devices to the investigation of splenic fever. He studied the habits of
the rod-like organisms, and found the aqueous humour of an ox’s
eye to be particularly suitable for their nutrition. With a drop of
the aqueous humour he mixed the tiniest speck of a liquid con-
taining the rods, placed the drop under his microscope, warmed it
auitably, and observed the subsequent action. During the first two

668 FBRMEOTATIOlir, AND ITS BEARINGS'

hours hardly any change was noticeable ; but at the end of this time
the rods begtin to lengthen, and the action was so rapid that at the
end of three or four hours they attained from ten to twenty times
their original length. At the end of a few additional hours they
had formed filaments in many cases a hundred times the length
of the original rods. The same filament, in fiict, was frequently
observed to stretch through several fields of the microscope. Some-
times they lay in straight lines parallel to each other, in other
cases they wero bent, twisted, and coiled into the most graceful
figures; while sometimes they formed knots of such bewildering
complexity that it was impossible for the eye to trace the individual
filaments through the confusion.

Had the observation ended hero an interesting scientific fact
would have been added to our previous store, but the addition
would have been of little practical value. Koch, however, continued
to watch the filaments, and after a time noticed little dots appearing
within them. These dots became more and more distinct, until
finally the whole length of the organism was studded with minute
ovoid bodies, which lay within the outer integument like peas
within their shell. By-and-by the integument fell to pieces, the
place of the organism being taken by a long row of seeds or spores.
These observations, which were confirmed in aU respects by the cele-
brated naturalist, Cohn of Breslau, are of the highest importance.
They clear up the existing perplexity regarding the latent and
visible contagia of splenic fever ; for in the most conclusive manner,
Koch proved the spores, as distinguished from the rods, to constitute
the contagium of the fever in its most deadly and persistent form.

How did he reach this important result? Mark the answer.
There was but one way open to him to test the activity of the con-
tagium, and that was the inoculation with it of living animals. He
operated upon guinea-pigs and rabbits, but tho vast majority of his
experiments were made upon mice. Inoculating them with the fresh
blood of an animal suffering from splenic fever, they invariably died
of the same disease within twenty or thirty hours after inoculation.
He then sought to determine how the contagium maintained its
vitality. Drying tho infectious blood containing the rod-like
organisms, in which, however, the sporos were not developed,
he found the contagium to be that which Dr. Sanderson calls
** fugitive.” It maintained its power of infection for five weeks at
the furthest. He then dried blood containing the i^y-developed-
q>ores, and exposed the substance to a variety of conditions. He
permitted the ^ied blood to assume the form of dust ; wetted this>
dust, allowed it to dry again, permitted it to remain for an indefinite
time in the midst of putrefying matter, and subjected it to various
other tests. After keeping the spore-charged blood which had been

ON THE PHENOMENA OF DISEASE.

569

treated in this fashion for four years, he inoculated a number of
mice with it^ and found its action as fatal as that of blood fresh
from the yeins of an animal suffering from splenic fever. There
was no single escape from death- after inoculation by this deadly
contagium. Uncounted millions of these spores are developed in
the body of every animal which has died of splenic fever, and every
spore of these millions is competent to produce the disease. The
name of this formidable parasite is Bacillm Anthracis}

Now the very first step towards the extirpation of these contagia is
the knowledge of their nature ; and the knowledge brought to us by
Dr. Koch will render as certain the stamping out of splenic fever as the
stoppage of the plague of p^brine by tho researches of Pasteur. One
small item of statistics will show what tliis implies. In the single dis-
trict of Novgorod in Russia, bctvroen the years 18G7 and 1870, over
fifty-six thousand cases of death by splonic fever, among horses, cows,
and sheep, were recorded. But its ravages did not confine them-
selves to the animal world, for during the time and in the district
referred to, five hundred and twenty-eight human beings perished in
the agonies of the same disease.

A description of the fever will hclj) you to come to a right decision
on the point which I wish to submit to your consideration. “ An
animal,” says Dr. Burdon Sanderson, “which perhaps for the previous
day has declined food and shown signs of general disturbance, begins
to shudder and to have twitches of the muscles of the back, and soon
after becomes weak and listless. In tho meantime the respiration
becomes frequent and often difficult, and the temperature rises to
throe or four degrees above the normal; but soon convulsions,
affecting chiefly the muscles of the back and loins, usher in the
final collapse, of which the progress is marked by complete loss of
power of moving the trunk or extremities, diminution of tempera-
tui'e, mucous and sanguinolent alvino evacuations, and similar dis-
charges from the mouth and nose.” In a single district of Russia,
as above remarked, fifty-six thousand horses, cows, and sheep, and
five hundred and twenty-eight men and women, perished in this
way during a period of two or three years. What the annual
fat^ty is throughout Europe I have no means of knowing. Doubt-
less it must be very great. The question, then, which I wish to
submit to your judgment is this : — ^Is the knowledge which reveals

(1) To produce its characteristic effects tho contagium of splenic fever must enter the
hlood. The virulently infective spleen of a diseased animal may be eaten with impunity
by mice. On the other hand, the disease refuses to be communicated by inoculation
to dogs, partridges, or sparrows. In their blood bacillus anthrads ceases to act as a
ferment. Pasteur announced more than six years ago the propagation of {the vitrios of
the silkworm disease called flacherie^ both by scission and by spores. He also made
some remarkable experiments on the permanence of the contagium in the form of qpores.
Bee ** Etudes sor la Maladie des Vers Soie,*’ pp. 168 and 266.

670 FBEMENTATION, AlH) ITS BEAEINGS .

to US the nature^ and which assures the extirpation, of a disorder so
Tinilent and so vile, worth the price paid for it P It is exceedingly
important that assemblies like the present should see clearly the
issues at stake in such questions as this, and that the properly-
informed common sense of the community should temper, if not re-
strain, the rashness of those who, meaning to be tender, would virtually
enact the most hideous cruelty by the imposition of short-sighted
restrictions upon physiological investigation. It is a modem
instance of zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, the
excesses of which zeal an instructed public opinion must correct.

And now let us cast a backward glance on the field we
have traversed, and try to extract from our labours such further
profit as they can yield. For more than two thousand years the
attraction of light bodies by amber was the sum of human knowledge
regarding electricity, and for more than two thousand years
fermentation was effected without any knowledge of its cause.
In science one discovery grows out of another, and cannot appear
without its proper antecedent. Thus, before fermentation could
be understood, the microscope had to be invented and brought to a
considerable degree of perfection. Note the growth of knowledge.
Leeuwenhoek, in 1680, found yeast to be a mass of floating globules,
but he had no notion that the globules were alive. This was proved
in 1836 by Cagniard de la Tour and Schwaun. Then came the
question as to the origin of such microscopic organisms, and in this
connection the memoir of Pasteur, published in the Annales de
Chimie for 1862, is epoch-making, proving as it did to all compe-
tent minds spontaneous generation to be thus far a chimera. On that
investigation all Pasteur’s subsequent labours were based. Ravages
had over and over again occurred among French wines. There was
no guarantee that they would not become acid or bitter, paj^ticularly
when exported. The commerce in wines was thus restricted, and
disastrous losses were often inflicted on the wine-grower. Every one
of these diseases was traced to the life of an organism. Pasteur
ascertained the temperature which killed these ferments of disease,
proving it to be so low as to be perfectly harmless to the wine.
By the simple expedient of heating the wine to a temperature
of fifty degrees centigrade, he rendered it inalterable, and thus
saved his country the loss of millions. He then went on to vinegar
— vin aigre^ acid wine — ^which he proved to be produced by a fer-
mentation set up by a little fungus called Mycoderma acetu Torula^
in fact, converts the grape juice into alcohol, and Mycoderma
aeeti converts the alcohol into vinegar. Here also frequent failures
ooomed and severe losses were sustained. Through the opera-
tion of unknown causes, the vinegar often became unfit for us^

ON THE phenomena OF DISEASE.

sn

sometimes indeed falling into utter putridity. It had been long
known that mere exposure to the air was sufficient to destroy it.
Pasteur studied all these changes, traced them to their living causes,
and showed that the permanent health of the vinegar was ensured
by the destruction of this life. He passed from the diseases of
vinegar to the study of a malady which a dozen years ago had
all but ruined the silk husbandry of France. This plague, which
received the name of pSri/w, was the product of a parasite which
first took possession of the intestinal canal of the silkworm, spread
throughout its body, and filled the sack which ought to contain the
viscid matter of the silk. Thus smitten, the worm would go auto-
matically through the process of spinning when it had nothing to
' spin. Pasteur followed this parasitic destroyer from year to year,
and, led by his singular power of combining facts with the logic of
facts, discovered eventually the precise phase in the development of
the insect when the disease which assailed it could with certainty be
stamped out. Pasteur’s devotion to this inquiry cost him dear. He
restored to Franco her silk husbandry, rescued thousands of her
population from ruin, set the looms of Italy also to work, but
emerged from his labours with one of his sides permanently
paralysed. His last investigation is embodied in a work entitled
** Studies on Beer,” in which he describes a method of rendering
beer permanently unchangeable. That method is not so simple as
those found effectual with wine and vinegar, but the principles
which it involves arc sure to receive extensive application at some
future day. Taking into account all these labours of Pasteur, it is
no exaggeration to state that the money value of his work would
go far to cover the indemnity which France had to pay to
Germany.

There are other reflections connected with this subject which,
even were I to pass them over without remark, would sooner or
later occur to every thoughtful mind in this assembly. I have
spoken of the floating dust of the air, of the means of rendering it
visible, and of the perfect immunity from putrefaction which accom-
panies the contact of germless matter and moteless air. Consider the
woes which these wafted particles, during historic and pre-historic
ages, have inflicted on mankind ; consider the loss of life in hospitals
from putrefying wounds ; consider the loss in places where there are
plenty of wounds but no hospitals, and in the ages before hospitals
were anywhere founded ; consider the slaughter which has hitherto
followed that of the battle-field, when those bacterial destroyers
are let loose, often producing a mortality far greater than that
of the battle itself ; add to this the other conception that in times
of epidemic disease the self-same floating matter has frequently,
if not alwayi^ mingled with it the special germs which produce

572 FEBHES^TATION, AND ITS BEAHINGS ON DISEASE.

the epidemic^ being thus enabled to sow pestilence and death over
nations and continents— consider all this and you will come with
me to the conclusion that all the havoc oi war^ ten times multi-
plied, would be evanescent if compared with the ravages due to
atmospheric dust.

This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been
permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information
regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering sentient world.
We have been scourged by in^'isible thongs, attacked from im-
penetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of
science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes.
Men of Glasgow, facts like these excite in me the thought that the
rule and governance of this universe arc different from what we in our
youth supposed them to be— that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible
and beneficent, in whom wo live and move and have our being and
our end, is to be propitiated by means different from those usually
resorted to. The first requisite towards such propitiation is knoic-
ledge ; the second is action, shaped and illuminated by that know-
ledge. Of knowledge we already sec the dawn, which will open out
by-and-by to perfect day, while the action which is to follow has
its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral and emotional nature
of man — ^in his desire for personal well-being, in his sense of duty,
in his compassionate sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men.
“How often,” says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on
Typhoid Fever, — “ How often have I seen in past days, in the
single narrow chamber of the day-labourer’s cottage, the father in
the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and
nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of
some poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of her
kindness in becoming herself the victim of the same disorder.”
From the vantage-ground already won I look forward with con-
fident hope to the triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like
that here described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly
revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, whoso intelli-
gent co-operation is absolutely essential to success, the final victory
of humanity is only a question of time. We have already a fore-
taste of that victory in the triumphs of surgery as practised at
your doors.

J. Tyndall.

LORD ALTHORPE AND THE REFORM ACT OP 1832..

Altiiorpe carried the Bill/* such is the tradition of our fathers,
** the Bill,” of course, being the Bill to them — ^the great Reform
Act of 1832, which was like a little revolution in that generation, —
which really changed so much, and which seemed to change so much
more. To have been mainly concerned in passing so great a measure
seems to many of the survivors of that generation, who remember
the struggles of their youth and recall the enthusiasm of that time,
almost the acme of fame. And in sober history such men will always
be respectfully and gravely mentioned, but all romance has died away.
The Bill is to us hardly more than other bills ; it is one of a great
many Acts of Parliament which in this day, partly for good and partly
for evil, have altered the ever- varying constitution of England. The
special charm, the charm which to the last you may see that
Macaulay always felt about it, is all gone. The very history of it
is forgotten. Which of the younger generation can say what was
General Gascoigne’s amendment, or who were the ** waverers,” or
even how many Reform “ Bills ** in those years there wore P The
events for which one generation cares most are often those of which
the next knows least. They are too old to be matters pf personal
recollection, and they are too new to be subjects of study :
they have passed out of memory, and they have not got into the
books. Of the well-informed young people about us, there are very
many who scarcely know who Lord Althorpe was.

And in another respect this biography has been unfortunate. It
has been kept too long. The Reform Act of 1867 has shed a painful
light on the Reform Act of 1832, and has exhibited in real life
what philosophers said were its characteristic defects. While these
lingered in the books they were matters of dull teaching, and no one
cared for them ; but now Mr. Disraeli has embodied them, and they
are living among us. The traditional sing-song of mere eulogy
is broken by a sharp question. Those who study that time say,

Althorpe, you tell us, passed the Bill. It was his frcupkness and his
high character and the rest of his great qualities which did it. But
was it good that he should have passed it P Would it not have been
better if he had not possessed those fine qualities P Was not some
higher solution possible P Knowing this Bill by its fruits, largely
good, but also largely evil, might we not have had a better Bill P At
any rate, if it could not be so, show why it could not be so. Prove that
the grave defects in the Act of 1832 were necessary defects. Explain
how it was that Althorpe had no choice, and then we will admire

574 LOBB ALTHOBPE AJH) THE BEFOBM ACT OF 1832.

him as you wish us.” But to this biographer — a man of that time,
then in the House of Commons on the T^ig side, and almost, as it
were, on the skirts of the Bill — such questions would have seemed
uxnpossible. To him, the Act of 1832 is still wonderful and per-
fect — i-the great measure which tee carried in mi/ youth; and as
for explaining defects in it, he would have as soon thought of
explaining defects in a revelation.

But if ever Lord Althorpe’s life is well written, it will, I think,
go far to explain not only why the Reform Bill was carried, but
why that Bill is what it was. He embodies all the characteristic
virtues which enable Englishmen to cfEect well and easily great
changes in politics : their essential fairness, their large roundabout
common sense,” their courage, and their disposition rather to give
up something than to take the uttermost fiirthing. But on the other
hand also he has all the characteristic English defects : their want
of intellectual and guiding principle, their even completer want of
the culture which would give that principle, their absorption in the
present difficulty, and their hand-to-mouth readiness to take what
solves it without thinking of other consequences. And I am afraid
the moral of those times is that these English qualities as a
whole — ^merits and defects together — are better suited to an early
age of politics than to a later. As long as materials are deficient,
these qualities are most successful in hitting off simple expedients,
in adapting old things to new uses, and in extending ancient
customs ; they are fit for instantaneous little creations, and admir-
able at bit-by-bit growth. But when, by the incessant application
of centuries, these qualities have created an accumulated mass of
complex institutions, they arc apt to fail, unless aided by others
very different. The instantaneous origination of obvious expedients
is of no use when the field is already covered with the heterogeneous
growth of complex past expedients ; bit-by-bit development is out
of place unless you are sure which bit should and which bit sliould
not be developed; the extension of customs may easily mislead
when there arc so many customs ; no immense and involved subject
can be set right except by faculties which can grasp what is immense
and scrutinise what is involved. But mere common sense is here
matched with ^lore than it can comprehend, lilce a schoolboy in the
differential calculus ; — and absorption in the present difficulty is an
evil, not a good, for what is wanted is that you should be able to see
many things at once, and take in their bearings, not fasten yourself
cm one thing. The characteristic danger of great nations, like the
Bomans or the English, which have a long history of continuous
creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the
great institotions wldch they have created.

, No doubt it would be a great exaggeration to say that this

LOBD ALTHOBFE AND THE BEPOEM ACT OP 1832, &7S

calamity happened in its fulness in the year 1832, and it would be
most unfair to Lord Althorpe to cite him as a complete example of
the characteristics which may cause it ; but there was something in
him of those qualities, and some trace in 1832 of that calamity —
enough in both cases to be a warning. Only a complete history
of the time can prove this ; but perhaps in a few pages I may a
little explain and illustrate it.

Let us first get, both as more instructive and as less tedious than
analysis, a picture of the man as he stood in the principal event of
his life. A good drawer has thus painted hin^. Lord JefiErey, the
great Edinburgh reviewer, who was an able lawyer and praetical
man of business in his day, though his criticism on party has not
stood the test of time, was Lord Advocate in the Beform Ministry
of 1830, and he is never tired of describing Lord Althorpe: —
“ There is something,” he writes, " to me quite delightful in his
calm, clumsy, courageous, immutable probity, and it seems to have
a charm for everybody.” “ I went to Althorpe,” he writes, again,
and had a characteristic scene with that most honest, frank, true, and
stout-hearted of God’s creatures. He had not come down-stairs, and
I was led up to his dressing-room, with his arms (very rough and
hairy) bare above the elbows, and his beard half-shaved and half
staring through the lather, with a desperate razor in one hand, and
a groat soap-brush in the other. He gave me the loose finger of his
brush hand, and with the usual twinkle of his bright eye and radiant
smile, he said, You need not be anxious about your Scotch bills
to-night, for we are no longer his Majesty’s ministers.’ ” And soon
after he writes again, at an after stage of the ministerial crisis,
When they came to summon Lord Althorpe to a council on the
Duke’s giving in, he was found in a shed with a groom busy oiling
the locks of his fowling-pieces, and lamenting the decay into which
they had fallen during his ministry.” And on another occasion he
adds what may serve as an intellectual accompaniment to these
descriptions, “Althorpe, with his usual frankness, gave us a pro-
tended confession of his political faith, and a sort of creed of his
political morality, and showed that though it was a very shocking
doctrine to promulgate, he must say that he had never sacrificed his
own inclinations to a sense of duty without repenting it, and always
found himself more substantially unhappy for having employed him-
self for the public good.” And some one else at the time said, “ The
Government cannot be going out, for Althorpe looks so very dis-
mal.” He was made (as we Icam from this volume) a principal
minister, contrary to his expectation and in opposition to his wish.
.He was always wanting to resign ; he was always uncomfortable, if
not wretched, and the instant he could he abandoned politics, and
would never touch them again, though he lived for many years.

576 LOIO) ALIHOBPE AND THE BEFOE^ ACT OF 1832 ,

Axid thisi thougli in appearance he was most successful, and was
almost idolized by his followers and friends.

At first this seems an exception to one of [Nature’s most usual
rules. Almost always, if she gives a great faculty she gives also an
enjoyment in the use of it. But hero Nature had given a remarkable
power of ruling and influencing men — one of the most remarkable
(good observers seem to say) given to any Englishman of that gene-
ration ; and yet the possessor did not like, but on the contrary, much
disliked to use it. The explanation, however, is, that not only had
Nature bestowed on Lord Althorpe this happy and great gift of direct-
ing and guiding men, but, as if by some subtle compensation, had
added what was, under the circumstances, a great pain to it. She
had given him a most sluggish intellect — only moving with efibrt,
and almost suffering, — generally moving clumsily, and usually
following, not suggesting. If you put a man with a mind like
this-— especially a . sensitive, conscientious man such as Lord Althorpe
was — to guide men quickly through complex problems of legislation
and involved matters of science, no wonder that he will be restive
and wish to give up. No doubt the multitude wish to follow him ;
but where is he to tell the multitude to go P His mind suggests
nothing, and there is a pain and puzzle in his brain.

Fortune and education had combined in Lord Althorpe’s case to
develop his defects. His father and mother were both persons of
great cultivation, but they were also busy people of the world, and
so they left their son to pick up his education as he could. A Swiss
footman, who did not know English very well, taught him to read,
and was his sole instructor and most intimate associate till he went
to Harrow.” His father, too, being a great fox-hunter, he clearly cared
more, and was more occupied with hounds and animals, as a young
boy, than with anything else ; and he lived mainly with servants
and people also so occupied, from which, as might be expected,
he contracted a shyness and awkwardness which stayed with Mm
through life. When he went to Harrow the previous deficiencies of
his education were, of course, against him, and he seems to have shown
no particular disposition to repair them. As far as can now be
learnt he was an ordinary strong-headed and strong-willed English
equal to necessary lessons, but not caring for them, and only
distinguished from the rest by a certain suppressed sensibility and
tenderness, which he also retained in after years, and which so^ned
a manliness that would otherwise have been rugged, and which
saved him from being unrefined.

At Cambridge his mother, as it appears, suddenly, and for the
first time, took an interest in his studies, and told him she should
expect him to be high at his first college examination. And this
a^f^s to have awakened him to industry. The examination was on

LOBD ALTHORPE AED THE REFORM ACT OF 1832. 577

mathematics, which suited him much better thau the Harrow classics,
and he really came out high in it. The second year it was the
same, though he had good competitors. But there his studies
ended. His being a nobleman at that time excluded him from the
university examinations, and he was far too apathetic to work at
mathematics, except for something of the sort, and his tutor seems to
have discouraged his doing so. Then, as since, the bane of Cambridge
has been a certain incomplete and rather mean way of treating
great studies, which teaches impHciily, if not plainly, that it was
as absurd to learn the differential calculus in and for itself as it
would be to keep a ledger for its own sake. On such a mind as Lord
Althorpe’s, which required as much as possible to be awakened and kq>t
awake to the interest of high studies, no external surroundings could
have been more fatal. He threw up his reading and took to hounds,
betting, and Newmarket, and to all which was then, even if not since,
thought to be most natural, if not most proper, in a young nobleman.

As iar as classical studies are concerned he probably lost nothing.
He w'as through life very opaque to literary interests, and in his
letters and speeches always used language in the clumsiest way.
But he had — perhaps from his childish field-sports — a keen taste
for animals and natural history, which nowadays would have been
developed into a serious pursuit. And as it was he had an odd
craving for figures, which might have been made something of in
mathematics. “ Ho kept,” we are told, “ an account of every shot
he fired in the course of a year, whether he missed or killed, and
made up the book periodically.” He would not pass the accounts
of the Agricultural Society without hunting for a missing three-
pence ; and when Chancellor of the Exchequer ho used, it is said, ** to
do all his calculations, however complicated, alone in his closet,”
which his biographer thinks very admirable, and contrasts with the
habit of Mr Pitt, who used to take a Treasury clerk into his confi-
dence,” but which was really very absurd. It is not by such
mechanical work that great budgets are framed, and a great minister
ought to know what not to do himself, and how to use, for every-
thing possible, the minds of others. Still there is much straight-
forward strength in this, if also some comic dulness.

If Lord Althorpe’s relatives did not give him a very good
education, they did not make up for it by teaching him light accom-
plishments. They sent him the ** grand tour,” as it was then
called ; but ho was shy and awkward, seems to have had no pre-
vious preparation for foreign society, would not go into it, and
returned boasting that he could not speak French. His mother — a
woman of great fashion and high culture— must have sighed very
much over so uncourtly and so ” English ” an eldest son.

Then, in the easy way of those times — it was in 1804 — ^he was

678 LOHl) ALTHOBFB ANB THE BEFOEM ACT OF 1832 .

brought into Parliament for Okehampton, a nomination borough,
some “ Mr. Strange,” a barrister, retiring in his favour, and his
interest being strong, he was made a Lord of the Treasury. But
the same apathy to intellectual interests which showed itself at
college clung to him here also. He showed energy, but it was not
the energy of a man of business. He passed, we are told, the
greatest part of his time in the country, and when he attended at
the Treasury, which was very rarely, and only on particular occa-
sions to make up a Board, he returned home immediately afterwards.
Indeed, he used to have horses posted on the road from London to
Althoipe, and often rode down at night, as soon as the House had
risen, in order that he might hunt with the Pytchley the next
morning.” “ On these occasions,” says another account, ‘‘ he had
no sleep, and often the hacks which he rode would fall down on the
road.” And years afterwards the old clerks of the office used to teU
of the rarity and brevity of his visits to the department, and of the
difficulty of getting him to stay; — all which shows force and character,
but still not the sort of character which would fit a man to be Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer. But though he had much of tho want of
culture. Lord Althorpe had none of the unfeelingness which also the
modem world is getting somehow to attach to the character of the
systematic sportsman. On the contrary, he was one of the many
instances which prove that this character may be combined with an
extreme sensibility to the sufferings of animals and man. He belonged
to the class of men in whom such feelings arc far keener than usual,
and his inner character approached to the “ Arnold type,” ** for to
hear of cruelty or injustice pained him ” almost “ like a blow.”

He, it seems, kept a hunting journal, which tells how his hounds
found a fox at Parson's Hill, and ran over old Naseby field
to Althorpe in fifty minutes, and then, after a slight check, over the
finest part of Leicestershire and all that sort of thing. But pro-
bably it does not tell one very natural consequence whic^ happened
to him from such a life. Being a somewhat imcouth person^
addicted to dogs and horses — ^a “ man's man,” as Thackeray used to
call it — ^he did not probably go much into ladies' society, and was
not very aggressive when he was there. But men who do not make
advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make
advances to them, and so it was with Lord Althorpe. He married a
Miss Acklom, a “ Diana Vernon” sort of person, “ rather stout, and

without pretension to regular biiaty ; ” but nevertheless, it is said,
“.with something prepossessing about her — clever, well read, with
a quick insight into the character of others, and with much self-
dependence.” And this self-dependence and thought she showed to
her great advantage in the principal affair of her life. Lord Althorpe’s
biognpher is sure, but does not say how, that the first declaration of

LOBl) ALTHOBPE AlH) THE BEFOBH ACT OF 1832. 579

love was made by the lady ; be was, it seems, too sby to tbink of sucb
a thing. As a rule, marriages in wbicb a young nobleman is actively
captured by an aggressive lady are not domestically bappy, tbougb
they may be socially useful, but in tbis case tbe happiness seems to
have been exceptionally great ; and when she died, after a few years,
be suffered a very unusual grief. " He went,^’ we are told, “ at
once to Winton, the place where be bad lived with her, and passed
several months in complete retirement, finding bis chief occupation
* in reading the Siblc,’^ in wbicb be found, at first, many grave diffi-
culties, sucb as the mention of tbe constellation “Orion” by the
prophet Amos, and the high place (an equality with Job and David)
given by Ezekiel to the prophet Daniel when still a young man,
“ and before be bad proved bunself to be a man of so great a calibre
as be certainly did afterwards.” On these questions, be adds,
“ I have consulted a Mr. Shepherd, tbe clergyman here, but his
answers are not satisfactory.” Happily, however, sucb a man is not
at tbe mercy of clergymen’s answers, nor upon petty details of
ancient prophets. Tbe same sensibility wbicb made him keenly
alive to justice and injustice in things of tbis world, went further,
and told him of a moral government in things not of this world.
No man of or near the Arnold species was ever a sceptic as to, far
less an unbeliever in, ultimate religion. New philosophies are not
wanted or appreciated by sucb men, nor are book arguments of any
real use, though these men often plod over them as if they were ;
for in truth an inner teaching supersedes everything, and for good
or evil closes the controversy ; no discussion is of any effect or force ;
the court of appeal, fixed by nature in such minds, is peremptory
in belief, and will not hear of any doubt. And so it was in this case.
Through life Lord Althorpe continued to be a man strong, though
perhaps a little crude, in religious belief ; and thus gained at the
back of his mind a solid seriousness which went well with all the
rest of it. And his grief for his wife was almost equally durable.
He gave up not only society, which perhaps was no great trial, but
also hunting — ^not because he believed it to be wrong, but because
ho did not think it seemly or suitable that a man after such a loss
should be so very happy as he knew that hunting would make him.

Soon after his marriage he had begun to take an interest in
politics, especijilly on their moral side, and of course the, increased
seriousness of his character greatly augmented it. Without this
change, though he might have thought he might have been occa-
sionally useful in outlying political questions, probably he would
have had no grave political career, and his life never would have
been written. But the sort of interest which he took in politics
requires some explanation, for though his time is not very long ago,
the change of feeling since then is vast.

VOL. XX. N.s. R R

580 LC^ ALTHOBFE A2CD 3HE BirOSM Ad OF 1832 .

If any person/’ said Sir Samuel Komilly, the best of judgeSi
for he liy^ through the time?, and was mixed upi heart and soul, in
the matters he speaks of, if any person be desirous of having an
adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced
in this country by the French Bevolution and all its attendant
horrors, he should attempt some reforms on humane and liberal
principles. He will then find not only what a stupid spirit of inno-
vation, but what a savage spirit, it has infused into the minds of his
countrymen.” And very naturally, for nothing is so cruel as fear.
A whole generation in England, and indeed in Europe, was so
frightened by the Beign of Terror that they thought it could only
be prevented by another Beign of Terror. The Holy Alliances, as
they were then called, meant this and worked for this. Though we
had not in name such an alliance in England, we had a state of
opinion which did the work of one without one. Nine-tenths of
the English people were above all things determined to put down
“ French principles,” and unhappily “ French principles” included
what we should all now consider obvious improvements and rational
reforms. They would not allow the most cruel penal code which
any nation ever had to be mitigated ; they did not wish justice to
be questioned ; they would not let the mass of the people be edu-
cated, or at least only so that it came to nothing ; they would not
alter anything which came down from their ancestors, for in their
terror they did not know but there might be some charmed value
even in the most insignificant thing ; and after what they had seen
happen in France, they feared that if they changed a single iota all
else would collapse.

Upon this generation, too, came the war passion. They waged, and
in the main — ^though with many errors — waged with power and spirit,
the war with Napoleon ; and they connected this with their horror
of liberal principles in a way which is now very strange to us, but
which was very powerful then. W e know now that Napoleon was the
head of a conservative reaction, a bitter and unfeeling reaction, just
like that of the contemporary English ; but the contemporary English
did not know this. To the masses of them he was Eohespierre
d chevaly as some one called him — a sort of Jacobin waging war, in
some occult way, for liberty and revolution, though he called himself
Emperor. Of course the ^ucated few gradually got more or less to
know that Napoleon hated Jacobins and revolution, and liberty too,
as much as it is possible to hate them ; but the ordmaiy multitude,
up to the end of the struggle, never dreamed of it. Thus in an
odd way the war passion of the time strengthened its conservative
feeling ; and in a much more usual way it did so too, for it absorbed '
men’s minds in the story of battles and the glory of victories, and
left no unoccupied thought for gradual improvement and dull reform

LOBD ALTHOBPE AM) THE BEFOBH ACT OF 1882. 681

at home. A war time, also, is naturally a harsh time; for the
tale of conflicts which sometimes raises men above pain, also
tends to make men indiflerent to it; the familiarity of the idea
ennobles but also hardens.

This savageness of spirit was the more important because, from
deep and powerful economical agencies, there was an incessant
distress running through society, sometimes less ' and sometimes
more, but always, as we should now reckon, very great. The
greatest cause of this was that we were carrying on, or trying to
carry on, a system of free trade under a restrictive tariff : we would
not take foreign products, and yet we wished to sell foreigners ours.
And our home market was incessantly disordered. First the war
and then the corn-laws confined us chiefly to our own soil for our
food, but that soil was of course liable to fail in particular years,
and then the price of food rose rapidly, which threw all other
markets into confusion— for people must live first, and can only
spend the surplus, after paying the cost of living, upon everything
else. The fluctuations in the demand for our manufactures at home
were ruinously great, though wo were doing all we could to keep
them out of foreign markets, and the combined effect was terrible.
And the next great cause was that we were daily extending an un-
precedented system of credit without providing a basis for it, and
without knowing how to manage it. There was no clear notion that
credit, being a promise to pay cash, must be supported by propor-
tionate reserves of cash held in store ; and that as bullion is the inter-
national cash, all international credit must be sustained by a store of
bullion. In consequence all changes for the worse in trade, whether
brought on by law or nature, caused a destruction of confidence, and
diflused an uneasy moral feeling which made them far worse than
they would havo been otherwise. The immense fluctuations in our com-
merce, caused by protection, were aggravated by immense fluctuations
in our credit, and the combined result was unspeakably disastrous.

During the French war these causes were not so much felt. Trade
was better, because wc were creating a foreign market for our-
selves. Just as lately, by lending to a miscellaneous mass of foreign
countries, we enabled those countries to buy of us, so in the great
war, by large subsidies and huge foreign expenditure, we created
a purchasing power” which was ultimately settled in our manu-
factures. We had nothing else to settle it with ; if we did not send
them direct, we must use them to buy the bullion, or whatever dse
it might be which we did send indirectly. This “ war demand,” of
which so much is said in the economical literature of those years, of
course ceased at the peace ; and as we declined to take foreign pro-
ducts in exchange for ours, no substitute for it could be found, and
trade languished in consequence. Agriculture, too, was worse after

B B 2

582 LOAD ALTHORFE AND THE AEFOEH ACT OF 1832.

the peace, for the natural protection given by the war was far more
effective than the artificial protection given by the corn-laws. The
war kept out com almost equally whatever was the price, but the
corn-laws were based on the “ sliding scale, which let in the com
when it became dear. Our farmers, therefore, were encouraged to
grow more com than was enough for the country in good years,
which they could not sell ; and they did not get a full price in bad
years, for the foreign com came in more and more as the price
rose and rose. Though the protection availed to hurt tho manu-
facturer, it was not eflectual in helping the farmer. And the con-
^ stant adversity of other interests, by a reflex action, also hurt him.
Committees on agricultural distress, and motions as to the relief of
trading distress, alternate in the parliamentary debates of those
years. Our credit system, too, was in greater momentary danger
after the peace than before ; for during the war it was aided by a
currency of inconvertible paper, which absolved us from the neces-
sity of paying our promises in solid cash, though at very heavy cost
in other ways, both at the instant and afterwards.

These fluctuations in trade and agriculture of course told on the
condition of the working classes. They were constantly suffering,
*and then the savage spirit ” of which Sir Samuel has spoken
showed itself at its worst. Suffering, as usual, caused complaint,
and this complaint was called sedition. The Habeas Corpus Act
was suspended, harsh laws wero passed, and a harsher administra-
tion incited to put it down. It could not be put down. It inces-
santly smouldered and incessantly broke out, and for years Englahd
was filled with tho fear of violence, first by the breakers of the law
and then by the enforcers of it.

Hesistance to such a policy as this was most congenial to a nature
half unhinged by misfortune, and always in itself most sensitive
and opposed to injustice. Even before his wife's death. Lord
Althorpe had begun to exert himself against it ; and afterwards he
threw the whole vigour not only of his mind but of his body into it.
So far from running away perpetually to hunt as in old times, he
was so constant in his attendance in Parliament that tradition says
hardly any one, except the clerks at the table, was more constantly
to be seen there. He opposed all the Acts by which the Tory
Government of the day tried to put down disaffection instead of
curing it, and his manly energy soon made him a sort of power in
Parliament. He was always there, always saying what was clear,
strong, and manly ; and therefore the loosely-knit opposition of that
day was often guided by him ; and the ministers, though strong in
numerical majority, feared him, for he said things that the best of
that majority understood in a rugged English way, which changed
feelings, even if it did not alter votes. He was a man whomi every
one in the House respected, and who therefore spoke to prepossessed

LOBD ALTHORPE AND THE BEFOEH ACT OF 1832. 583

hearers. No doubts too^ the peculiar tinge which grief had given
to his character added to his influence. He took no share in the
pleasures of other men. Though a nobleman of the highest place, still
young, as we should now reckon (he was only thirty-six when Lady
Althorpe died), he stood aloof from society which courted him, and
lived for public business only ; and therefore he had great weight in
it, for the English very much value obviously conscientious service,
and the sobered foxhunter was a somewhat interesting character.

He had not indeed any clear ideas of the cause of the difficulties
of the time, or of the remedies for them. He did no doubt
attend much to economical questions ; and his taste for figures,
shown before in calculating the ratio of his good shots to his bad,
made statistical tables even pleasing to him. His strong sense,
though without culture and without originality, struggled dimly and
sluggishly with the necessary problems. But considering that he
lived in the days of Huskisson and Bicardo, his commercial ideas
are crude and heavy. He got as far as the notion that the sub-
stitution of direct taxes for the bad tarifE of those days would be

a good measure,*’ but when he came to apply the principle he
failed from inability to work it out. Nor did years of discussion
effectually teach him. In his great budget of 1832 — ^the first which
the Whigs had made for many years, and at which therefore every
one looked with unusual expectation — ^he proposed to take off a duty
on tobacco, and to replace it by a tax on the transfer of real and
funded property, together with a tax on the import of raw cotton ;
and it was the necessity of having to withdraw the largest part of
this plan, that more than anything else first gave the Whigs that
character for financial incapacity which clung to them so long.
A crude good sense goes no way in such problems, and it is useless
to apply it to them. The other economical problem of the time,
how to lay a satisfactory basis for our credit. Lord Althorpe was
still less able to solve, and excusably so ; for the experience which
has since taught us so much did not exist, and the best theories then
known were very imperfect. The whole subject was then encum-
bered with what was called the ** currency question,” and on this
Lord Althorpe’s views were fairly sensible, but no more.

I have said what may seem too much of the distresses of the
country fifty or sixty years ago, not only because the mode in
which he dealt with them is the best possible illustration of Lord
Althorpe’s character, but also because some knowledge of them is
necessary to an understanding of ^^Parliamentary reform,” as it
was in his time, on account of which alone any one now cares for
him. The ** bill,” if I may say so, for these miseries of the country
was sent in to the old system of Parliamentary representation ; and
very naturally. The defenders of that system of necessity conceded
that it was anomalous, complex, and such as it would have been im-

584 LOBD ALTHOBPE AND THE BEFOBM ACT OF 1832.

posEdble to set up de novo. But they argued that it was practically
successful, worked well, and promoted the happiness of the people
better than any other probably would. And to this the inevitable
rejoinder at the time was : ** The system does not work well ; the
country is not happy ; if your system is as you say to be judged by
its fruits, that system is a bad system, for its fruits are bad, and the
consequences everywhere to be seen in the misery around us.’^
Upon many English minds which would have cared nothing for an
apparent work of theoretical completeness, this practical” way of
arguing, as it was called, pressed with irresistible strength.

The unpopularity was greater because a new generation was
growing up with “ other thoughts ” and “ other minds ” than that
which had preceded it. Between 1828 and 1830, a new race came
to influence public affairs, who did not remember the horrors of the
French Eevolution, and who had been teased to death by hearing their
parents-talk about them. The harsh and cruel spirit which those
horrors had awakened in their contemporaries became itself by the
natural law of reaction an object of disgust and almost of horror to
the next generation. When it was said that the old structure of
Parliament worked well, this new race looked not only at the
evident evils amid which they lived, but at the oppressive laws and
administration by which their fathers had tried to cure those evils ;
and they debited ” both to the account of the old Parliament. It
was made responsible for the mistaken treatment as well as for the
deep-rooted disease, and so the gravest clouds hung over it.

The Duke of Wellington too (the most unsuccessful of Premiers
as well as the most successful of generals), broke the Tory party
— the natural party to support this system — into fragments.
With a wise renunciation both of his old principles and of his
fixed prejudices he had granted ” Catholic emancipation,” and so
offended the older and stricter part of his followers. They accused
him of treachery, and hated him with a hatred of which in this
quiet age, when political passion is feeble, wo can hardly form an
idea. And he then quarrelled, also, with the best of the moderate
right — ^Mr. Huskisson and the Ganningites. He had disliked Mr.
Canning personally when alive, he hated still more the liberal prin-
ciples which he had begun to introduce into our foreign policy, and
he was an eager, despotic man who disliked difference of opinion ; so
just when he had broken with the most irrational section of his
party, he broke with its most rational members too and left him-
self very weak. I^o one so much, though without meming it, aided
the cause of Parliamentary change, for he divided and enfeebled
the supporters of the old system; he took away the question of
Catholic Emancipation which before filled the public mind ; and he
intensified the unpopularity of all he touched by the idea of a
Military premier,’** for wl^h we should not care now, but which

LOBB ALTHOBFE AND THE BEFORH ACT OF 1832. 686

was odious and terrible then when men still feared oppression from
the Gk)yemment.

Upon minds thus predisposed the French Bevolution of 1830
broke with magical power. To the young generation it seemed
like the fulfilment of their dreams.

“The meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in Bomance,

And lively thought that they might be
Called upon to exorcise their skiU,

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secluded island, heaven knows where,

But in the very world, which is the world
Of aU of us.”

And even to soberer persons this new revolution seemed to prove
that change, even great change, was not so mischievous as had been
said — that the good of 1789 might be gained without the evil, and
that it was absurd not to try Eeform when the unreformed world
contained so much which was miserable and so much which was
difficult to bear. Even a strong Tory ministry might have been
overthrown, so great was the force of this sudden sentiment ; the
feeble ministry of the Duke of Wellington fell at once before it ;
and the Whigs were called to power.

Their first act was to frame a plan of Parliamentary reform, and
that which they constructed was many times larger than anything
which any one expected from them. All those who remember those
times say that when they heard what was proposed they could
hardly believe their cars. And when it was explained to the House
of Commons, the confusion, the perplexity, and the consternation
were very great. Eeform naturally was much less popular in the
assembly to be reformed than it was elsewhere. The general
opinion was that if Sir B. Peel had risen at once and denounced the
bill as destructive and revolutionary he might have prevented its
being brought in. Another common opinion in the House was that
the “ Whigs would go out next morning.” But the bill had been
framed by one who, with whatever other shortcomings and defects,
has over had a shrewd eye for the probable course of public opinion.
** I told Lord Grey,” says Lord Bussell, “ that none but a large
measure would be a safe measure.” And accordingly, as soon as its
provisions came to be comprehended by the country, there was
perhaps the greatest burst of enthusiasm which England has ever
eeen (certainly the greatest enthusiasm for a law, though that for
a favourite person may sometimes have risen as high or higher).
A later satirist has spoken of it as the ** Great bill for giving every-
body everything,” and everybody almost seems to have been as
much in favour of it as if they were to gain everything by it.

586 LOED ALTHOBPE AND THE BEFOBM ACT OF 1832,

Agricultural counties were as eager as manufacturing towns ; mcn>
who had always been Tories before were as warm as Liberals. The
country would have “ the bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the
biU.”

But this enthusiasm did not of itself secure the passing of the bill ;
there were many obstacles in the way, which it took months to
overcome, and which often made many despair. First the bill was
not one of which the political world itself strongly approved ; on the
contrary, if left to itself, that world would probably have altogether
rejected it. It was imposed by the iminitiated on the initiated,
the many on the few ; and inevitably those who were compelled to
take it did not like it. Then the vast proposals of the ministry
deeply affected many private interests. In 1858 I heard an able
politician say, The best way for a Government to turn itself out is
to bring in a Eeform Bill ; the number of persons whom every such
bill must offend is very great, and they are sure to combine together,
not on Reform, but on something else, and so turn out the Govern-
ment.” And if there was serious danger to a ministry which
ventured to propose such petty reforms as were thought of in 1858,
we can imagine the magnitude of the danger which the ministry of
1832 incurred from the great measure they then brought in. One
member, indeed, rose and said, I am the proprietor of Ludgershall,
I am the member for Ludgershall, I am the constituency of Ludger-
shall, and in all three capacities I assent to the disfranchisement of
Ludgershall.” But the number of persons who were so disinterested
was rare. The Bill of 1832 affected the franchise of every constituency,
and, therefore, the seat of every member ; it abolished the scats of
many, and destroyed the right of nomination to seats also possessed
by many ; and nothing could be more repugnant to the inclinations
of most. A House of Commons with such a bill before it was inevi-
tably captious, unruly, and difficult to guide. And even Jf there
had been or could have been a House of Commons which at heart
lik^ the bill, there would still have been the difficulty, that
many other people then most influential did not much Uke
it. A great many members of the Cabinet which proposed it,
though they believed it to be necessary, did not think it to
be desirable. The country would have some such measure, and
therefore they proposed this. Lord Palmerston and Mr. Grant,”
says Lord Russell, had followed Mr. Canning in his opposition to
Parliamentary Reform. Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland had
never been very eager on the subject.” Lord Brougham did not
approve of the disfranchisement of nearly so many boroughs, and
others of the Cabinet were much of the same mind. Their opinion
was always dubious, their action often reluctant, and, according to
Mr. Greville, some of the most influential of them being very

LOBD ALTHOBPE AND THE BEFOBM ACT OP 1832. 587

sensitive to tlie public opinion of select political society were soon

heartily ashamed of the whole thing.”

The House of Lords, too, was adverse, not only as an assembly of
men mostly rich and past middle age is ever adverse to great political
change, or as a privileged assembly is always hostile to any movement
which may destroy it, but for a reason peculiar to itself. The
English House of Lords, as we all know, is not a rigid body of fixed
number like the upper chambers of book constitutions, but an elastic
body of unfixed number. The Crown can add to its members when
it pleases and as it pleases. And in various ways which I need not
enumerate now, this elasticity of structure has been of much use, but
in one way it does much harm. The Crown for this purpose means the
ministry ; the ministry is appointed by a party, and is the agent of
that party, and therefore it makes peers from its own friends all but
exclusively. Under a Tory Government more than nine-tenths of
the new peers will be Tory ; under a Whig Government more than
nine-tenths will be Whig ; and if for a long course of years either party
has been continuously, or nearly so, in power, the House of Lords
will be filled with new members belonging to it. And this is a
serious inconvenience, because tho longer any party has been thus in
power, the more likely it is to have to go out and lose power, and
the new ministry which comes in, and the new mode of thought
which that ministry embodies, finds itself face to face with a House
of Peers embodying an antagonist mode of thought, and formed by
its enemies. In 1831 this was so, for the Tories had been in office
almost without a break since 1784, had created peers profusely, who
were all Tories, and added the Irish elective peers who, from the
mode of election, were all Tories too. In consequence the Reform
^movement of 1831 and 1832 found itself obstinately opposed to a
hostile House of Lords, whose antagonism aided the reluctance
diffused through tho House of Commons, and fostered the faint-
heartedness common in the Cabinet. The King, too, who had begun
by being much in favour of reform, gradually grew frightened. His
correspondence with Lord Grey gives a vivid picture of a well-
meaning, but irresolute man, who is much in tho power of the last
speaker, who at last can be securely relied on by no one, and who
gives incessant (and as it seems unnecessary) trouble to those
about him. The rising republicanism of tho day will find in these
letters much to serve it ; for however convinced one may be, on
general grounds, that English royalty was necessary to English
freedom at that time, it is impossible not to be impatient at seeing
how, month after month in a great crisis, when there was so much
else to cause anxiety and create confusion, one stupid old man should
have been able to add so much to both.

And all through the struggle the two effects of the new French

688 LORD AITHORPB AND THE REFORM ACT OF 1832.

Revolution were contending with one another. Just as it aroused
in young and sanguine minds (and the majority of the country was
just then disposed to be sanguine) the warmest hopes, in minds
oppositely predisposed it aroused every kind of fear. Old and timid
people thought we should soon have in England “ Robespierre and
the guillotine.” Indeed, in a way that it is rather amusing now to
consider, the French horrors of 1793 are turned into a kind of
intellectual shuttlecock by two disputants. One says, See what
comes of making rash changes, how many crimes they engender, and
how many lives they lose ! ” “ "No ” replies the other, “ see what comes
of not making changes till too late, for it was delay of change, and
resistance to change, which caused those crimes and horrors.” Nor
were these unreal words of mere rhetoric. They told much on many
minds, for what France had done and would do then naturally filled
an immense space in men’s attention, as for so many years not long
sinco Europe had been divided into France and anti-France.

With all these obstacles in its way the ministry of 1831 had the
greatest difficulty in cariy^’ing the Reform Bill. I have not space to
narrate, even in the briefest way, the troubled history of their doing
so. Parliamentary debates arc generally dull in the narration, but
so great was the excitement, and so many were the relieving circum-
stances, that an accomplished historian will be able to make posterity
take some sort of exceptional interest in these. The credit of the
victory, such as it is, must be divided between many persons ; Lord
Grey managed the king, and stood first in the eye of the country ;
Lord Russell contributed the first sketch of the bill, containing all
its essential features, both good and bad, and ho introduced the first
bill into the House of Commons ; the late Lord Derby then first
showed his powers as a great debater. But the best observers say
that Lord Althorpe carried the bill : he was leader of the House at
the time, and the main strain of ruling one of the most troubled
of Parliaments was on him. His biographer. Sir James le Slarchant,
who was present at the debates, says : —

«Lord Althorpo’s capacity as a leader had been severely tested throua:hoat
this tremendous struggle, and it extorted the praiso oven of his political
opponents. 1 recollect Sir lleniy Hardinge saying, ' It was Althorpe carried
the bill. His fino temper did it. And in answer to a most able and argu-
mentative speech of Crocker, ho rose and merely said, that he had made some
calculations which he considered as entirely conclusive in refutation of the
right honourable gentleman’s arguments which he had mislaid, but if the
House would be guided by his advice they would reject the amendment” —
which they accordingly did. There is no standing against such influence as
this* The Whigs ascribed Lord Althorpe’s influence not to his temper alone,
but to the confidence felt by the House in his integrity and sound judgment,
an (^inipn so universal that Lord Grey was induced by it to press upon him a
peerage' that he might take charge of the bill in the committee of ^e Lords;
and the design was abandoned not from any hesitation or unwillingness on the

LOBD ALTHOBPE AND THE BEFOBH, ACT OF 1882 . 689

part of Lord Althorpe, but from tbe difficulty of finding a successor to him in
the Commons.' So bad a speaker, with so dow a min^ has never received so
great a compliment in a scene where quickness and oratory seem at first sight
to be the most absolutely requisite of qualities.”

But it is no doubt a great mistake to imagine that these qualities
ore the true essentials to success of this kind. A very shrewd
living judge says, after careful reflection, that they are even hurtful.
“A man,” says Mr. Massey in his history, “who speaks seldom,
and who speaks ill, is the best leader of the House of Commons.”
And no doubt the slow-speeched English gentlemen rather sympa-
thize with slow speech in others. Besides, a quick and brilliant
leader is apt to be always speaking, whereas a leader should inter-
fere only when necessary, and be therefore felt as a higher force
when ho docs so. His mind ought to be like a reserve fund ; not
invested in showy securities, but sure to be come at when wanted,
and always of stable value. And this Lord Althorpe’s mind was ;
there was not an epigram in the whole of it ; everything was solid
and ordinary. Men seem to have trusted him much as they trust
a faithful animal, entirely believing that he would not deceive if he
could, and that he could not if he would.

And what, then, was this great “ bill ” — ^which it was so great an
achievement to pass ? Unfortunately this is not an easy question
to answer shortly. The “bill” destroyed many old things and
altered many old things, and we cannot understand its effects except
in so far as we know what these old things were.

“A variety of rights of suffrage,” said Sir James Mackintosh,
“ is the principle of the English representation.” How that variety
begtin is not at all to the present purpose ; it grew as all English
things grow — ^by day-by-day alterations from small beginnings ;
and the final product was very different from the first beginning,
as well as from any design which ever at any one time entered
any one’s mind. There always was a groat contrast between the
m^e of representation in boroughs and in counties, because there
was a great contrast in social structure between them. The “knight
of the shire” was differently chosen from the “burgess of the
town,” because the “ shire ” was a different sort of place from the
town, and the same people could not have chosen for the two — ^the
some people not existing in the two. The borough representations
of England, too, “struggled up ” — there is hardly any other word to
describe it — in a most irregular manner. The number of towns
which sent representatives is scarcely ever the same in any two of
our oldest Parliaments. The sheriff had a certain discretion, for
the writ only told him to convene “ de quolibet burgo duos bur-
genses,” and did not name any towns, in particular. Most towns
then disliked the duty and evaded it if possible, which seems to

690 LOKD AMHORPB ABO) THE REFORM ACT OF 1832.

have augmented the sheriff’s power, for he could permit or prevent
the evasion as much as he chose. And at a very early period great
differences grew up between the ways of election in the towns which
were always represented. There seems to have been a kind of
“ natural selection ; ” the most powerful class in^ach borough chose
if it could at each election, and if any class long continued the most
powerfiil, it then acquired customary rights of election which came
to be unalterable. Nor was there any good deciding authority to
reg^ulate this confusion. The judge of elections was the House of
Commons’’ itself, and it often decided not according to law or
evidence, but as political or personal influence dictated. And
rights of election thus capriciously recognised became binding on the
borough for ever. As might bo expected the total result was
excessively miscellaneous. The following are the franchises of the
boroughs in two counties as legislators of 1832 found them

SOMERSETSnmE.

Bristol . . . Freeholders of 4()«., and freo burgesses.

Bath .... Mayor, aldermen, and common councihnen only.

Wells .... Mayor, masters, burgesses, and freemen of tho seven
' trading companies of tho said city.

Taunton , . . Potwallors, not receiving alms or charitj'.

Bridgewater . . Mayor, aldeimen, and twenty-four capital burgesses of tho
borough paying scot and lot.

Ilchester . . . Alleged to bo tho inhabitants of the said town paying scot
and lot which the town called potwallcrs.

Minehead . . . The parishioners of Dunster and Minehead, being house-
keepers in tho borough of Minehead, and not receiving
alms.

MtT i B ORN Port . The capital bailiffs and their deputies, the number of bailiffs
being nine, and their deputies being two ; in the com-
monalty, stewards, their number being two; and the
inhabitants thereof paying scot and lot.

Lancashire. ^

Lancaster . . . Freemen only.

Wigan .... Free burgesses.

Clitheroe , . . Freeholders, resident and non-resident.

Liverpool . . . Mayor, bailiffs, and freemen not receiving alms.

Preston . . . All the inhabibuits.

Nothing could be more certain than that a system which
was constructed in this manner must sooner or later need great
alteration. Institutions which have grown from the beginning
by adaptation may last as long as any if they continue to
pcMsess the power of adaptation. The force which created them
still exists to preserve them. But in this case the power of
adaptation was gone. A system of representation made without
design* was fixed as eternal upon a changing nation; and some-
how or other it wSs sure to become unsuitable. Nothing could be

LOBD ALXHOBPE AEB IKE BEFORM ACT OF 1832. 591

more false in essence than the old anti-reform arguments as far as
they affected the wisdom of ojur ancestors ; ” for the characteristic
method of our ancestors had been departed from. Our ancestors
changed what they wanted bit by bit^ just when and just as they
wanted. ~ But their descendants were forbidden to do so ; they were
asked to be content not only with old clothes but with much patched
old clothes^ which they were denied the power to patch again. And
this sooner or later they were sure to refuse.

In 1832 a grave necessity existed for changing it. The rude
principle of natural selection by which it had been made, insured
that at least approximately the classes most influential in the
nation would have a proportionate power in the legislation ; no great
class was likely to be denied anything approaching to its just weight.
But now that a system framed in one age was to be made to continue
unchanged through after ages there was no such security. On
the contrary, the longer the system went on without change the
more sure it was to need change. Some new class was sure in
course of time to grow up for which the fixed system provided no
adequate representatives; and the longer that system continued
fixed, the surer was this to happen, and the stronger was it likely
that this class would be. In 1832, such a class had arisen of the
first magnitude. The trading wealth of the country had created a
new world which had no voice in Parliament comparable to that
which it had in the country. Not only were some of the greatest
towns, like Birmingham and Manchester, left without any members
at all, but in most other towns the best of the middle class felt that
they had no adequate power ; they were either extinguished by a
franchise too exclusive, or swamped by one too diffused ; cither way,
they were powerless.

There was equal reason to believe that by the same inevitable course
of events some class would come to have more power in Parliament
than it should. The influence which gave the various classes their
authority at the time in which the machinery of our representation
was famed, would be sure in time to ebb away, wholly or in part,
from some of them. And in matter of fact they did so. The richer
nobility and the richer commoners had come to have much more power
than they ought. The process of letting the most influential people
in a borough choose its members, amounted in time to letting the
great nobleman or great commoner to whom the property of the
town belonged, choose them. And many counties had fallen into
the direction of the same hands also, so that it was calculated, if not
with truth, at any rate with an approach to it, that one hundred and
seventy-seven lords and gentlemen chose as many as three hundred
and fifty-five English members of Parliament. The parlia-
mentary power of &ese few rich peers and squires was much too

592 LOBB ILTaORPE lio) THE EEFOEM ACT OF 1832. ^

great when compared with their share in the life of the nation, just
as that of the trading class was too weak; the excess of the one
made the deficiency of the other additionally difficult to bear ; and
the contrast was more than ever galling in the years from 1830 to
1832, because just then the new French Bevolution had revived the
feud between the privileged classes and the non-privileged. The
excessive parliamentary power of these few persons had before been
a yoke daily becoming heavier and heavier, and now it could
be endured no longer.

The reform ‘^bill’^ amended all this. It abolished a multitude of
nomination boroughs, gave members to large towns and cities, and
changed the franchise, so that in all boroughs at any rate, the
middle classes obtained predominant power. And no one can deny
that the good so done was immense ; indeed, no one does now deny
it, for the generation of Tories that did so has passed away. TSo
doubt the Eeform Act did not produce of itself at once the new
heaven and new earth which its more ardent supporters expected
of it. It did nothing to remove the worst evils from which the
country suffered, for those evils were not political but economical ;
and the classes whom it enfranchised were not piore economically
instructed than those whom they superseded. The doctrine of
protection then reigned all through the nation, and while it did so
no real cure for those evils was possible. But this Act, coming as
it did when a new political generation was prepared to make use of
it, got rid entirely of the cruel spirit '' by which our distresses
had been repressed before, and which was as great an evil as those
distresses themselves, introduced many improvements, municipal
reform, tithe reform, and such like, in which the business-like
habit of mind due to the greater power of the working classes,
mainly helped and diffused a sweeter and better spirit through
society.

But these benefits were purchased at a price of the 4rst magni-
tude, though, from the nature of it, its payment was long deferred.
The reformers of 1832 dealt with the evils of their time, as they
would have said, in an English way, and without much thinking of
anything else. And exactly in that English way, as they had under
their hands a most curious political machine which had grown with-
out design, and which produced many very valuable, though not
very visible effects, they, without thought, injured and destroyed
some of the best of it.

First, the old system of representation, as we have seen, was
based on a variety of franchises. But, in order to augment the
influence of the middle class, the reformers of 1832 destroyed that
vaiiely; they introduced into every borough the £10 household
franchise, and with a slight exception which we need npt take

LOBD ALTHOBFE AND THE BEFOBM ACT OP 1632. 693

account of, made that franchise the only* one in all boroughs.
They raised the standard in the boroughs in which it was lower
than J610| and lowered it in those where it was higher ; and in this
way they changed the cardinal principle of the system which they
found for the established uniformity as a rule instead of variety.

And this worked well enough at first, for there was not for some
years after 1832 much wish for any more change in our constitu-
encies. But in Qur own time we have seen the harm of it. If you
establish any uniform franchase in a country, then it at once becomes
a question, What sort of franchise is it to be P Those under it will
say that they are most unjustly excluded ; they will deny that there
is any real difference between themselves and those above ; they will
show without difficulty that some whom the chosen line leaves out
are even better than those which it takes in. And they will raise
the cry so familiar in our ears — ^the cry of class legislation. They
will say. Who are these ten-pound householders, these arbitrarily
chosen middle-class men, that they should be sole electors P Why
should they be alone enfranchised and all others practically disfran-
chised, either by being swamped by their more numerous votes or by
not having votes at all P The case is the stronger because one of the
most ancient functions of Parliament, and especially the Commons
House of Parliament, is the reformation of grievances. This
suited very well with the old system of variety; in that miscel-
laneous collection of constituencies every class was sure to have some
members who represented it. There were then working-class con-
stituencies sending members to speak for them, — ‘*men,** says
Mackintosh, '^of popular talents, principles, and feelings; quick
in suspecting oppression, bold in resisting it, not thinking favourably
of the powerful ; listening almost with credulity to the complaints
of the humble and the feeble, and impelled by ambition when they
are not prompted by generosity to be defenders of the defenceless.”
And in cases of popular excitement, especially of erroneous excite-
ment, this plan insured that it should have adequate expression, and
so soon made it calm. But the legislation of 1832 destroyed these
working-men’s constituencies; ‘‘they put the country,” as it was
said afterwards, “ under ten-pounders only.” And in consequence
there are in our boroughs now nothing but working-class constitu-
encies; there arc no longer any ten-pound householders at all.
There is throughout our boroughs a uniform sort of franchise, and
that the worst sort — a franchise which gives the predominance to
the moat ignorant and the least competent, if they choose to
use it. The middle classes have as little power as they had
before 1832, and the only difference is, that before 1832 they
were ruled by those richer than themselves, and now they are ruled
by those poorer.

594 XOltB ALTHOBPE AND THE BEFOEM ACT OF 1832.

No doubt there is still an inequality in the franchise between
counties and boroughs — the solo remnant of the yariety of our
ancient system. But that inequality is much more difficult to
defend now when it stands alone, than it was in old times when it
was one of many. And the " ugly rush ” of the lower orders which
has effaced the ^'hard and fast^’ line established in 1832 threatens
to destroy this remnant of variety. In a few years probably there
will be but one sort of franchise throughout all England, and the
characteristic work of 1832 will be completely undone ; the middle
classes, whoso intelligence Macaulay praised, and to whom he helped
to give so much power, will have had all that power taken away
from them.

No doubt, too, there is still a real inequality of influence, though
there is a legal equality of franchise. The difference of size of
boroughs gives more power to those in the small boroughs than to
those in the large. And this is very valuable, for elections for large
boroughs are costly, and entail much labour that is most disagreeable.
But here, agsiin, the vicious precedent of establishing uniformity
set in 1832 is becoming excessively dangerous. Being so much
used to it people expect to see it everywhere. There is much risk that
before long there may be only one sort of vote and only one size of
constituency all over England, and then the reign of monotony will
be complete.

And, secondly, the reformers of 1832 committed an almost worse
error in destroying one kind of select constituency without creating
an intellectual equivalent. Wo are not used nowadays to think
of nomination boroughs as select constituencies, but such, in
truth, they were, and such they proved themselves to be at,
perhaps, the most critical period of English history. Lord Bussell,
no favourable judge, tells us *‘that it enabled Sir Bobert Wal-
pole to consolidate the throne of the House of Hanover amid
external and internal dangers.’’ No democratic suffrage would
then have been relied on for that purpose, for the mass of English-
men were then more or less attached to their hereditary king, and
they might easily have been induced to restore him. They had not,
indeed, a fanatical passion of loyalty towards him, nor any sentiment
which would make them brave many dangers on his behalf; but
there was much sluggish and sullen prejudice which might have
been easily aroused to see that he had his rights, and there were
many relics of ancient loyal zeal which might have combined with
that prejudice and ennobled it. Nor did the people of that day
much care for what we should now call Parliamentary Government.
The educated opinion of that day was strongly in favour of the
House of Hanover ; but the numerical majority of the nation was
not equally so ; perhaps it would have preferred the House of Stuart.

LOBD ALTHOBPE AED THE ItEFOBM ACT OF 1832. 696

Bat the higher nobility and the richer gentry possessed a great
power over the opinions of Parliament because many boroughs were
subject to their control^ and by exerting that power they, in con-
junction with the trading classes, who were then much too weak to
have moved by themselves, fixed the House of Hanover on the
throne, and so settled the freedom of England. These boroughs
at that time, for this purpose as select constituencies, wore of
inestimable value, because they enabled the most competent opinion
in England to rule without dispute, when, under any system of
diffused suffrage, that opinion would either have been out- voted or
almost so.

And to the last these boroughs retained mueh of this peculiar
merit. They were an organ for what may bo called specialized
political thought, for trained intelligence busy with publie affairs.
Not only did they bring into Parliament men of genius and ability,
but they kept together a higher political world capable of appre-
ciating that genius and ability when young, and of learning from
it when old. The AVhig party, such as it was in those days especially,
rested on this parHamentary power. In them was a combination
of more or less intelligent noblemen of liberal ideas and aims, who
chose such men as liurke, and Brougham, and Hume, and at last
Macaulay, to develop those ideas and to help to attain those aims.
If they had not possessed this peculiar power, they would have had no
such intellectual influence ; they would have simply been gentlemen
of what we now think good ideas, with no special means of advancing
them. And they would not have been so closely combined together
as they were ; they would have been scattered persons of political
intelligence. But having this power they combined together, lived
together, thought together, and the society thus formed was enriched
and educated by the men of genius whom it selected as instruments,
and in whom in fact it found teachers. And there was something
like it on the government side, though the long possession of power,
and perhaps the nature of Toryism, somewhat modified its charac-
teristics.

The effect is to be read in the parliamentary debates of those
times. Probably they are absolutely better than our own. They
are intrinsically a better discussion of the subjects of their day than
jpurs are of our subjects. But however this may be, they are beyond
a question relatively better. General knowledge of politics has
greatly improved in the last fifty years, and the best political thought
of the present day is much superior to any which there was then.
So tha^ even if our present parliamentary debates retained the level
of their former excellence, they would stiU not bear the same relation
to the best thought of the present that the old ones bear to the best
thought of the past. And if the debates have really fallen off much

VOT« XX. K.S. 8 s

696 LOBB ALTHOBFE AlO) THE BEFOBH ACT OF 1832.

(as I am sore they liaTe)i tliis conclusion will be stronger and more
certain.

Nor is ibis to be wondered at. If you lessen the cause you will
lessen tbe effect too. Not only are not the men whom these select
constituencies brought into Parliament now to be found there, but
the society which formed those constituencies, and which chose those
men, no longer exists. The old parties were combinations partly
aristocratic, partly intellectual, cemented by the common possession
and the common use of political power. But now that the power is
gone the combinations are dissolved. The place which once knew
them knows them no more. Any one who looks for them in our
present London and our present politics will scarcely find much
that is like them.

This society sought for those whom it thought would be useful to
it in all quarters. There was a regular connection between the
“ unions,” — ^thc great debating societies of Oxford and Cambridge —
and Parliament. Young men who seemed promising had even a
chance of being competed for by both parties. We all know the
line which the wit of Brooke’s made upon Mr. Canning —

** The turning of coats so common is grown,

That no one would think to attack it ;

But no caso until now was so flagrantly known
Of a schoolboy’s turning his jacket.”

This meant that it having been said and believed that Mr.
Canning, who had just left Oxford, was to be brought into Parlia-
ment by the Whig opposition, he went over to Mr. Pitt, and was
brought in by the Tory ministry. The Oxford Liberals of our
generation are quite exempt from similar temptations. So far from
their support in Parliament being craved by both sides, they cannot
enter Parliament at all. When many of these tried to do so in
the autumn of 1867, their egregious failure was one of the most
striking events of that remarkable time.

There was a connection too then between the two parts of the pub-
lic service now most completely divided — the permanent and the
parliamentary civil services. Now, as we all know, the chief clerks
in the Treasury and permanent heads of departments never think of
going into Parliament; they regard the parliamentary statesmen
who are set to rule over them much as the Bengalees regard the
English — as persons who are less intelligent and less instructed than
thfxnselves, but who nevertheless are to be obeyed. They never
think of changing places any more than a Hindoo thinks of becom-
ing an Englishman. But in old times, men like Lord Liverpool,
Sir Georm Bose, and Mr. Huskisson were found eminent in the
public offices^ and in consequence of that eminence were brought
into Parliament. The party in office were then, as anxious

LOBD ALTHOBPE A1U> THE BEF0BH ACT OF 1832 . 597

to obtain competent belp in passing measures of finance and detail,
and they then obtained it thus, whereas now their successors do not
obtain it at all.

There was then, too, a sort of romantic element in the lives of
clever young men which is wholly wanting now. Some one said
that Macaulay’s was like a life in a fairy tale — ^he opens a letter
which looks like any other letter, and finds that it contains a seat
in Parliament. Gibbon says that just as he was destroying an army
of barbarians, Sir Gilbert Elliot called and offered him a seat
for Liskeard. Great historians will never probably again be
similarly interrupted. The effect of all this was to raise the intel-
lectual tone of Parliament. At present the political conversation
of members of Parliament — a few of the greatest excepted — ^is less
able and less striking than that of other persons of fair capacity.
There is a certain kind of ideas which you hardly ever hear from
any other educated person, but which they have to talk to their
constituents, and which, if you will let them, they will talk to you
too. Some of the middle-aged men of business, the soap-boilers/’
as the London world disrespectfully calls them, whom local influence
raises to Parliament, really do not seem to know any better ; they
repeat the words of the hustings as if they were parts of their creed.
And as for the more intellectual members who know better, no one
of, good manners likes to press them too closely in argument on
politics any more than he likes to press a clergyman too strictly on
religion. In both cases the status in the world depends on the belief
in certain opinions, and therefore it is thought rather ill-bred,
except for some great reason, to try to injure that belief. Intd-
lectual deference used to be paid to members of Parliament, but now,
at least in London, where the species is known, the remains of that
deference are rare.

The other side of the same phenomenon is the increased power of
the provinces, and especially of the constituencies. Any gust of
popular excitement runs through them instantly, grows greater and
greater as it goes, till it gains such huge influence that for a moment
the central educated world is powerless. No doubt, if only time can.
be gained, the excitement passes away ; something new succeeds, and
the ordinary authority of trained and practised intelligence revives.
But if an election were how to happen at an instant of popular fury,
that fury would have little or nothing to withstand it. And, even
in ordinary times, the power of the constituencies is too g^eat. my
are fast reducing tlie members, especuilly tbe weaker sort of than,
to ddegates. There is already, in many places, a committee which
often telegraphs to London hoping that their member will vote this
▼ay or that, and the member is unwilling not to do so, because at
the next election, if offended, the committee may, perchance, turn

. S B 2

598 LOBD ALXHOBPE AND THE BEFOBlf ACT OF 1832.

the scale against him. And this dependence weakens the intellec-
tual influence of Parliament, and of that higher kind of mind of
which Parliament ought to bo the organ.

We must remember that if now we feel these evils we must
expect ere long to feel them much more. The Reform Act of 1867
followed in the main the precedent of 1832 ; and year by year we
shall feel its consequences more and more. The two precedents
which have been set will of necessity, in the English world, 'which
is so much guided by precedent, determine the character of future
Reform Acts. And if they do the supremacy of the central group
of trained and educated men which our old [system of parliamentary
choice created, will be completely destroyed, for it is already half

gone.

I know it is thought that we ean re'V’ive this intellectual influence.
Many thoughtful reformers believe that by means of Mr. Hare’s
system of voting, b}’^ the cumulative suffrage, the limited suffrage,
or by some others like them, wo may be able to replace that which
the legislation of 1832 began to destroy, and that which those who
follow them are destroying. And I do not wish to say a word against
this hope. On the contrary, I think that it is one of the most
important duties of English politicians to frame these plans into the
best fonn of which they arc capcahle, and to try to obtain the assent
of the coimtry to them. But the difficulty is immense. The
reformers of 1832 destroyed intellectual constituencies in great
numbers without creating any new ones, and without saying, indeed
without thinking, that it was desirable to create any. They thus
by conspicuous action, w’hich is the most influential of political
instruction, taught mankind that an increase in the power of
numbers was the change most to be desired in England. And of
course the mass of mankind are only too ready to think so. They
are always prone to l)elieve their own knowledge to be “for all
practical purposes ” sufficient, and to wish to be emancipated from
the authority of the higher culture. What we have now to do,
therefore, is to induce this self-satisfied, stupid, inert mass of men

to admit its own insufficiency, which is very hard ; to understand
fine schemes for supplying that insuflSciency, which is harder ; and
to exert itself to get those ideas adopted, which is hardest of all.
Such is the duty which the reformers of 1832 have cast upon us.

And this is what of necessity must happen if you set men like
Lo|^ Althorpe to guide legislative changes in complex institutions.
Bemg 'without culture, they do not know how these institutions
grew ; being without insight, they only sec one half their effect; being
without foresight, they do not know what will happen if they are
enlarged; being without originality, they cannot devise anything
new to supply if necessary the place of what is old. Connnou

LORD ALTHORFE AND THE REFORM ACT OF 18?*2. 599

sense no doubt they bave, but common sense without instruction
can no more wisely revise old institutions than it can write the
I^autical Almanac. Probably they will do some present palpable
good, but they will do so at a heavy cost ; years after they have
passed away, the bad effects of that which they did, and of the prece-
dents which they set, will be hard to bear and difficult to change.
Such men arc admirably suited to early and simple times. English
history is full of them, and England has been made mainly by
them, but they fail in later times when the work of the past is
accumulated, and no question is any longer simple. The simplicity
of their one-idea’d minds, which is suited to the common arithmetic
and vulgar fractions of early societies, is not suited, indeed rather
unfits them for the involved analysis and complex ^^problem-
papers” of later ages.

There is little that in a sketch like this need bo said of Lord
Althorpc’s life after the passing of the Reform Act. The other acts
of Lord Grey’s ministry have nothing so memorable or so character-
istic of Lord Althorpe that anything need bo said about them. Nor
docs any one in the least care now as to the once celebrated mistake
of Mr. Littleton in dealing with O’Connell, or Lord Althorpe’s con-
nection with it. Parliamentary history is only interesting when it
is important constitutional history, or when it illustrates something
in the character of some interesting man. But the end of Lord
Althorpc’s public life was very curious. In the November of 1834
his brother, Lord Spencer, died, and as he was then leader of the
House of Commons a successor for him had to be found. But
William lY., whose liberal partialities had long since died away,
began by objecting to every one proposed, and ended by turning
out the ministry — ^another event in his reign which our coming
republicans will no doubt make the most of. But I have nothing
to do with the king and the constitutional question now. My
business is with Lord Althorpe. He acted very characteristically, —
he said that a retirement from office was to him the cessation of acute
pain,” and never afterwards would touch it again, though he lived
for many years. Nor was this an idle affectation, far less indolence.
“You must bo aware,” he said once before, in a letter to Lord
Brougham, that my being in office is nothing less than a source
of misery to me. I am perfectly certain that no man ever disliked
it to such a degree as I do ; and, indeed, the first thing that usually
comes into my head when I wake is how to get rid of it.” eHe
retired into the country and occupied himself with the rural pur-
suits which he loved best, attended at quarter sessions, and was
active as a farmer. “Few persons,” said an old shepherd, “could
compete with my lord in a knowledge of sheep.” He delighted to
watch a whole flock pass, and seemed to know them as if he had

600 ^ LOBB ALHOBFE AND ITBE BEFOBIC AOI OF 1832 .

lived with them. Of all my former pursnitB,” he wrote, just after
Lady ilthorpe’a death, and in the midst of his grief, “the only one
in which I now take any interest is breeding stock; it is the only
one in which I can build castles in the air.” And as soon as he
could, among such castles in the air he lived and died. No doubt,
too, mudi better for hynself than many of his friends, who long
wanted to lure him back to politics. He was wise with the solid
wisdom of agricultural England ; popular and useful ; sagacious in
usual things; a model in common duties ; well able to advise men
in the daily diiculties which ore the staple of human life. But
beyond this he could not go. Having no - call to decide on more
intellectual questions, he was distressed and pained when he hod to
do so. He was a man so picturesquely out of place in a great scene
that if a great describer gets hold of him he may be long remem-
bered ; and it was the mi^ortune of his life that the simplicity of
his purposes and the reliability of his character raised him at a great
conjuncture to a high place for which nature had not meant him,
and for which he felt that she had not.

Walter Bagehot.

DANIEL DERONDA.

The author of ''Adam Bode ” and " Romola ” lias long been on the
eminenco of those whoso writings are events, and her later books
have come before us in a form which has made them subject, like
other events, to general discussion during progress. Since the
beginning of this year, Daniel Deronda and those about him — Sir
Hugo and Grandcourt, Klesmer and Hans Meyrick, Gwendolen and
Mirah, Mordccai and little Jacob — ^have been among the public per-
sonages whose doings and motives have been most warmly canvassed
in newspapers and in common talk. Criticism, in some quarters, has
oven been beforehand with creation, and favoured us with a profound
analysis of one character after another of the group before it was
half developed. Conversation has ebbed and flowed over the ques-
tions, will Gwendolen hate her husband enough to kill him P will
Daniel care for the Jewess enough to marry her P Men have
declared no one could ever use such long words as Deronda, and
women have wondered how any one could throw herself at a man’s
head like Gwendolen. Society has asked itself, are Hebrew prophets
really to be found to-day in back streets oS Holbom, and is a gather-
ing of the Israelites an event which may really happen to-morrow P
The orthodox, who have always been surprised by the religious
earnestness of a writer manifestly not one of themselves, have this
time seemed to discern that she leans towards the Jewish form of
monotheism. The advanced, who have hitherto enjoyed a style
reflecting in every sentence the philosophy of the day, have this
time begun to murmur, and feel that a novel may contain too much
philosophy too technically put. We have all had our say, and if
to many the book has seemed not easy, and to some not agreeable,
the interest of all is the great tribute to its power ; find what faults
we please, it is certain that no other writer living is able thus to
arrest, occupy, and nourish our thoughts.

In many things " Daniel Deronda” is like the former novels of
George EUot, in some considerably imlike. It is written under the
same urgent sense of the larger interests of mankind and of the
duty each of us owes to all. To this view of life and conduct
belongs a moral ardour which, rising to devotional pitch, utters its
last aspiration in the cry —

* * Oh may 1 join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world ! ”

Such is that religion of George Eliot’s which, being " something else
than a private consolation,” many of the religious fail to understand.

602

DANIEL DEEONDA.

Its infinenoe governs all she writes. To exalt -the social and
abase the selfish principloi to show the futility of merely personal
claims, cares, and cravings, to purify the passions by exhibiting
their fatal or miserable issues when they are centred in the
individual alone — such are the moral purposes which we feel
at work beneath all her artistic purposes. Out of the resources of
her genius, this writer is accustomed to compose mottoes in various
styles for heading her own chapters. The following fragment m
the style of seventeenth-century prose is taken from a heading in
“ Daniel Deronda ” : —

** In all ages it hath been a favourite text that a potent love hath the nature
of an isolated fatality, whereto the mind’s opinions and wonted resolves aro

altogether alien Yet all love is not such, oven though potent, nay, this

passion hath as largo a scope as any for allying itself with every operation of
the soul ; so that it shall acknowledge an effect from the imagined flight of
unknown firmaments, and have its scale sot to the grander orbits of what has
been and shall be.”

In such a sentence on the nature of love we recognise at once George
Eliot’s habitual drift. She will not say, with the old poets and
those who now-a-days share their temper, “Love is enough.”
Pharamond, rather, must attend to his kingdom and forget AzalaiSw
Love must not lead the lover to break with duty or renounce hie
past. "Take warning by Tristram, Abailard, Borneo, the old reckless
heroes whose loves led only to disaster. To be worthy of respon-
sible modem souls — to lead to noble and harmonious issues — the
love of man and woman must be brought into conscious harmony
with all the higher elements of their lives, and identified, it may be,
with some great social interest. The world is not made for those
who set private happiness in the first place; or rather, the only
true private happiness is to be found in the same channels along
which flow the currents of universal good.

In “ Daniel Deronda,” we feel ourselves more than ever encom-
passed with this sense of universal interests and outside forces. It
is brought home to us in one way when we are told to remember
that the days in which the actors of the story play their parts were
the days of the American war, “ when ideas were with fresh vigour
making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring
itself fiercely ; when women on the other side of the world would
not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a com-
mon cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard
of that willing loss and were patient ; ” and in the same way, when
elsewhere we are reminded how all this while events were making
ready for the world-changing field of Sadowa. It is brought home
to us in another way when the insignificance of the individual
and feelings among the mass is dwelt upon, as it is continually.

DAJSVSL DERONDA.

00*8

and scorn is showered upon those who ignorantly cry out for happi-
ness and expect the universe to be fashioned according to their
desires. Some readers, indeed, are likely to feel that points of this
kind are made too often, and, if they do not judge the American
war and the German war irrelevant, at any rate to think some of tho
animadversions the author addresses to her own characters im-
portunate. When any of these want their own way, and take it for
granted things will turn out as they would like, they are not only
chastened, but rebuked with bitterness. Of Gwendolen Harleth and
her losses at play it is sarcastically said that the choices of rouktte
had not adjusted themselves to her claims; ” and in a hundred passages
this reproof of “ claims ” is the burden of the author’s reflections.
She speaks somewhere ef the “intolerance” which the experienced
are prone to exhibit towards the outbreaks of “ the first rage of dis-
appointment in life’s morning ” — “ the passionate youthful rebellion
against what is not fitly called pain, but rather the absence of joy.’'
And in the same breath she speaks of the “ self-enclosed unreasonable^
ness and iminety ” of such feelings of disappointment and rebellion,
and herself sets, I think, an example of the intolerance in question.
She has no patience with those who expect good things without
deserving them. She will by no moans let people off when they are
selfish, and takes the part of the species against the individual till
wc almost feel it is not fair, and want to go over to the other side.
For after all there are two sides to these things ; and if, in a fiction,
love is too harshly sacrificed to duty, we incline to take love’s part,
and to say it is all very well, but there are cases where love must
have his way before duty is possible ; there is a certain measure of
self-regard which is necessaiy to fruitful self-devotion; there are
sacrifices which avail nothing, because they wither up in the victim
all power of doing good to any one. If, again, a character is too
sternly punished for expecting to find life pleasant, we are inclined
to ask, but was it all his own, or her own, fault P are people taught
when they are young what life is really like P and should not some
of the chastisement fall upon mankind, upon the collective want of
conscience which sends out poor human beings into the world under
a delusion as to what the world has to offer them P

Every problem in conduct, every human action and situation,
involves some issue or other between personal cravings and instincts
and the laws that make for the common good. Most writers of
fiction have looked at life, and described its actions and sitaations,
from the point of view of the individual, and his feelings and expe-
riences under trial ; they have written in sympathy with their own
characters in the struggle with the inexorable. George Eliot has
changed the point of view ; she has a sterner sense of the conse-
quences and responsibilities of human action ; she is severe upon her

004

DANIEL DEBONDA.

ohazacters, and in aympathy, so to speak, with the inexorable. That
a writer of fiction should have arisen who takes this new view of
life’s meaning, is a thing which marks an epoch ; in finding room
for these enlarged considerations, the art of fiction has taken a new
departure. But the artist should be impartial, exhibiting all the
phases of the conflict between desire and duty, what we would
like and what we may have, but not taking a side too avowedly.
By all means, let a work of imagination exhibit the career of a
spoiled child, and purify our selfish passions by showing through
what fires of probation the pampered one must go ; but the lesson
of the story will come out just as weU, its imaginative effect will
be just as clear and strong, if the moral is not too much proclaimed.
A story-teller should beware — ;more even than other people— of
loving mankind so well as to be unjust to particular men and women
when they offend ; and surely George Eliot is unjust, or at least
needlessly sarcastic, with her own erring children ; in the mingled
mood of scorn and tenderness with which she handles their infirmities,
scorn seems sometimes to predominate.

The social philosophy of the writer being what we are prepared
for, and her strenuous and yearning moral ardour no whit relaxed,
the field of her story, and the figures that move upon the field, are
variously new. We are led along paths some of them more
familiar to our feet, and others less, than any the same hand has
led us along before. Of that byegone provincial middle-class or low
life, with the humours of which we have been so many times moved
to tears and laughter, we this time see but little, and much, on the
other hand, of drawing-rooms and country-houses, the scenery of
the ordinary novel. But alternately with these, we are introduced
among scenes which to most of us will be altogether new. The
story, with a single hero, has a double plot. One plot, the one
conducted in drawing-rooms and country-houses, is concerned with
the relations of Daniel Deronda to an English beauty, the spoiled
child Gwendolen Harleth, afterwards Mrs. Grandcourt. The other
plot, the one conducted in Holborn back-shops and Chelsea lodgings,
is concerned with his relations to a forlorn Jewish maiden, Mirah
Cohen, and her brother Mordecai. In the first, we follow the
history of Gwendolen’s probation ; we watch her presumptuousness,
her wrongdoing, her remorse, and the suffering she goes through,
with the influence of Deronda to aid and encourage her, on her way to
become better, and to join the choir whose music is the gladness of
the world— or, as the author this time puts it, to turn into “ one of
tboBO women who make others glad that they were bom.” What
we follow in the second plot is the history of a private passion which
presently becomes associated and identified with devotion to a public
cause. Placed between the ill-wedded English wife who dings to

DANIEL DEEONDA.

ms

him for guidance in her despair, and the Jewish maiden whom he
has succoured in her forlomness, it is with Mirah, not Gwendolen,
that Daniel presently finds himself in love ; and having in the mean-
time discovered the secret of his birth, and that he is himself a Jew,
his love for Mirah goes hand in hand with an enthusiasm for the
doctrines of her brother, who is a latter-day prophet of his race ; in
marrying a Jewess, he devotes himself at the same time to the
national destinies of the Jews.

In choosing this particular form of social passion, and making her
love-tale revolve in this particular one of the grander orbits of what
has been and shall be, the author has confronted great difficulties.
As, in a former book, we found it hard to feel that the cause of the
Spanish gipsies was great enough for Fedalma to renounce her love
for its sake, so, in this, we find it hard to believe that the gathering of
the Jews, and the promotion of their national destinies, is a cause real
and substantial enough to consecrate the love of Deronda and Mirah.
Most readers, oven if they can render some historical justice to the
genius and energy of this martyred race, are likely to know little,
if anything, of an inner, or a higher, life among the modem Jews,
and to be slow in realising Mordecai as a serious personage, or in
believing that a man of the world like Deronda, having taken up
Mordecai’s ideas, will be able to make anything of them. It is not
a question of what may or may not, as a matter of fact, be going on
about us, but of what our imagination can effectively realise. The
author shows, indeed, that to this difficulty she has been quite
awake ; representing Deronda himself, before his eyes were opened,
as able to imagine contemporary Jews chiefly in such colours as the
following : — He saw himself guided by some official scout into a
dingy street ; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a hawk-
eyed woman, rough-headed and unwashed, cheapening a hungry
girl’s last bit of finery ; or in some quarter only the more hideous for
being smarter, he found himself under the breath of a young Jew
talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with
gentlemen’s tastes, and not fastidious in any transactions with which
they would favour him — and so on through the brief chapter of his
experiences in this kind.” Against the heavy strain she has thus
laid upon her own art by the choice of her chief motive, George
Eliot puts forth both power and skill, and has succeeded in making
of Mordecai a striking figure of romance, so that he and his ideas
seem something picturesque, impressive even, and not too impossible.
But real, near, and living he does not seem in the same sense as
most other figures in the story, including most of the Jews in it ; as
the broken-down, wheedling coward and gambler who is the father
of Mirah and Mordecai, the vulgar kind-hearted pawnbroker and
his family — ^Ezia and Jacob and Adelaide Bebekah ; all these are

606

DANIEL DEBONDA.

brought on, with a few incisive and brilliant strokes, in the very
lineaments of life.

The worst is, that the fair and innocent figure of Mirah herself
somehow shares, for us, her brother's insubstantiality. She is
evidently the heroine of the author’s predilection, who calls her
*^dear Mirah,” and describes how her “dear head” lay on the
pillow, and how sweet she looked as she sat with her hands folded
.. before her, or when she had braced herself to master a sorrow, and
dipped her face in cold water, and come down with the rings of her
hair straying about her freshened countenance. But for all the
loving care bestowed upon her, and for all her sweet looks and voice
and touching history, readers do not generally feel drawn to Mirah,
nor as if they cared for her really. She is passive, and does little
but let herself be rescued and taken care of. Neither, except in the
one long monologue in which she tells her story, docs she say much.
We do not get to know her half as well as we know every other
member of the little Chelsea household — a charming picture of
refinement without riches and of brisk warmheartedness — in which
she is received and surrounded with affection.

It is very different with the other heroine. Gwendolen Ilarleth,
I think, is one of the happiest as well as the most completely studied
of George Eliot’s creations. At first, indeed, we are not quite sure
about her. There is a suspicion of the unwholesome — even of the
unladylike — in the way in which she “ winds her neck about,” and
in touches of her bearing and talk at the beginning. One or two
traits are told of her — such as the killing of the canary, the
declining to stir one night and give her sick mother her medicine —
which are too odious. But these arc not followed up, and we
presently forget them. In the sequel Gwendolen leaves with us an
impression not only perfectly real, but in spite of her faults, which
fate and the author visit with so little mercy, singularly fiiscinating.
She is presumptuous, she is vain, she is full of herself and without
much heart for others, she has at first no idea of anything but
enjoying life, she does, or rather drifts into, a great wrong ; but yet
she keeps a hold on our sympathies. When we find her in her
brilliancy, ordering her half-sisters and Jocosa, ordering her mother,
breaking the heart of her cousin Eex, “loved without being love-
able,” then we might perhaps resent her sovereignty, as we do such
sovereignty in real life, were it not that the author herself does more
than justice for us, and puts her down too harshly. Under all her
imperiousness and care for self, we are constantly sensible of
fine instincts. To the mild mother to whom she feels herself
superior, her behaviour is at many moments most sweet and win-
ning.. She is careless about giving Eex pain, but there is nobleness
in that untamed virgin instinct which bids him stand off with

DjLKlEL DEBONDA.

607

a ‘‘Pray don't make love to me — liate it." A common vanity
would have resented Deronda’s interference with her gambling and
redemption of the necklace, and more bitterly still Klesmer’s stem
verdict on her talents ; but Gwendolen is fascinated by Deronda,
and owes Klesmer no grudge. She does bad things, but the story is
so conducted that she has much excuse, and sins as much from what
is best as from what is worst in her nature. She accepts Grandcourt
although she knows all about his former mistress and illegitimate
children ; but as much to save her mother from imminent straits as
herself. And even with this double constraint urging her, she
accepts him not deliberately, but as it were against her wiU. “ If
anything could have induced her to change, it w'ould have been the
prospect of making all things easy for ^ poor mamma : ’ that, she
admitted, was a temptation. But no ! she was going to refuse him."
And yet, when he comes for his interview, she has accepted him
before it is over. There are two scenes between Gwendolen and
Grandcourt, every phase and every word of which are conceived, I
think, with extraordinary justice and skill. I mean the scene on the
knoll at Diplow where, without any express purpose, the girl
swerves aside from his proposal, and eludes, without refusing, him ;
and the other scene in the drawing-room at Offendeno where, this
time against her express purpose, she drifts into the “ tremendous
decision," and cannot bring herself to say “ yes " when he finally
asks “Do you command me to go In this last instance particu-
larly, the play of character in the two, and that absence of impor-
tunity in Grandcourt which makes him an endurable lover to the
defiant Gwendolen, are contrived with admirable art and knowledge.

And presently we have the consequences to Gwendolen of her
tremendous decision — bitter remorse and bitter hatred. Grandcourt
is a kind of domestic Castlcreagh, cold, absolute, placidly arrogant
and heartless. In all things else narrow and impenetrable, he is
subtle in the arts of rule. The same politic undemonstrative obsti-
nacy which had secured him his bride, the same quiet power of
pressing an advantage, presently holds her down in a servitude
which maddens her. Her girlish and confident spirits find them-
selves confronted and subdued by something far more stubborn.
Tho process of subjugation cannot but seem to many readers
too sudden and complete ; we leave Gwendolen expecting to have
her own way in marriage, and find her again after a few weeks
conquered, and, beneath the show which her pride keeps up, already
inwardly desperate. True, the author has not thought fit to show
us the process and stages of subjugation, but I think, she has made
us feel that tho subjugation was inevitable. Gwendolen's force of
will and daring had been more imaginary than real, and had never
been tested against any practical opposition. Her selfishness is

DAIOSL DEEONDA.

the selfishness of ignorance and high spirits ; his^ of hardened and
unalterable character. Grandconrt’s knowledge that she knows his
past and has married him neTertheless^ together with her mother’s
poverty and dependency^ give him an absolute hold over her.
His perfect hatefulness, and her perfect helplessness, are exhibited
in a few most masterly scenes. He is all the more hateful for being
never otherwise than within his rights ; he is unimpeachable, how-
ever intolerable. Before and since her marriage, Gwendolen has
been more and more drawn to Beronda, as a person who can sympa-
thize with and understand her, and direct her towards some Ugher
ideal of life and conduct after which she blindly yearns. Sho
confides in Deronda and clings to him ; Grandcourt perceives this,
and without condescending to jealousy, interferes ; he carries his
wife away for a yachting trip alone with him in the Mediterranean.
Again we are spared the details of that hideous companionship ;
but when at last Grandcourt is drowned in a boat accident at Genoa,
we are made to realise what has been his wife’s pent-up loathing
by the remorse which visits her, by her confessions of murderous
imaginings if not murderous purposes which she has cherished,
by her horror when she believes she has not done all to save her
tyrant as he went down.

Once more, Daniel Deronda is her confidant and friend. She is
free, and her nature, strengthened by trial, is capable of being
redeemed and elevated. But happiness is not in store for her. At
Genoa, Daniel on his part has received from his mother the revela-
tion of his Jewish birth, and his life has become devoted to Mirah
and Mordecai and their race. Gwendolen for a moment cries out
that she is forsaken, but presently puts a bravo face on her life,
wishes Daniel and Mirah happiness, and devotes herself to making
her mother and sisters comfortable with the moderate jointure that
has been left her. And so we leave her, uncertain of the future.
She has gone through the fire, and means honestly to try tfnd make
others glad that she was born.” We cannot tell what will come of
it, but our presentiment is that sho will by-and-by please everybody
about her by relenting to her old lover, Eex, who has got a fellow-
ship and is going to do well at the bar.

That is no triumphant or satisfying issue to a career which we
have followed and realised as we have Gwendolen’s. The whole
book seems thrown out of balance and harmony when the plot which
chiefly interests us ends thus, while happiness and fulfilment crown
the other, in which we interest oursdves little by comparison.
Daniel Deronda is disappointing. He is that difficult character to
draw — a man who attracts women without pursuing them, because
he is fiill of sympathy and seeks nothing for himself. This type
of a tender-hearted, open-minded, serviceable nature, rich without

BANIEL BSBONDA.

609

egoisnii the author has taken immense pains to illustrate and to
analyse. She has endowed him with physical beauty and manlinA Ai^^
with intelligence, and many noble qualities. But he is not what he
ought to be, or at all equal to the fine things we are told concerning
him. In the first place, his position and occupations are, I think,
against the part he plays in the story. A man who doe% nothing,
who is ever so ready and helpful in other people’s afEairs, but has no
pursuit of his own which a woman can enter into, or distinction
which she can admire, is surely not the likeliest to influence women,
as Deronda does at first sight, or seem to them a heroic example.
And were that not so, surely his language is too high and abstract ;
his exhortations, to have the effect attributed to them, would need
to be more personal ; Gwendolen, in her distress and her craving
for guidance, would feel that he was kind and spoke with wisdom,
but that his speech went over her head and besidcf her. Cold, also,
she could not choose but think him ; cold certainly he is, to be
armed always with so much philosophy in his interviews with this
piteous, beautiful, and appealing creature. Or if his self-control
comes not from coldness but from chivalry, and a quick foresight
of the resultii|of unguarded feeling, then we ought to be made
to feel that it costs him an effort to bear himself as he does,
and we are not made to feel that it costs him an effort. We
could even believe he had fire in him, if he showed it in his
wooing of Mirah. But with the exception of one slight out-
break of jealousy against Hans Meyrick, his friend who is also in
love with her, Deronda is towards Mirah the coolest of lovers. It is
a long while before he is her lover at all, and when his mother, the
Jewish actress who has become a princess and dislikes her people,
charges him, saying “ You are in love with a Jewess,” it is a point
on wliich “ he feels a repugnance either to deny or to affirm.” True,
Mirah’s dependent position, no less than Gwendolen’s bound one,
was a thing to put him on his guard ; only then, in this case also,
we want to feel that he is not on his guard without a struggle. And
though he might be on his guard before her, yet he would not be in
doubt about his feelings in ber absence. And surely, the moment
when he does at last speak, and asks Mirah to be his wife, is
ill-chosen. It is the moment when her good-for-nothing father
has just stolen Deronda’s ring from the table. Then Deronda asks
her, ” in a tone of reverent adoration,” to be his wife ; must not this
seem to the woman an act of mere generosity, such an act as the
pride of the meekest would be apt, at that moment, to rise up
against, and say I^o, you are very good, but I do not choose to be
married out of magnanimity.”

Thus much of the conduct and characters of the new story, at least
in its leading threads. Among the subordinate characters, as always

610

DAlflEL SEBONDA.

«

in tliis writer’s works, there are many brilliant and finished pictures.
Thore is the musician Klesmer with his lion’s mane and his impetuous
strides, “taking up his cross meekly/’ nevertheless, “in a world
overgrown with amateurs ” ; there is Miss Arrowpoint, the heiress
whom Klesmer marries, a perfect type of unpretending goodness and
refinement ; there is Grandcourt’s ignoble henchman, Thomas
Oranmer Lush ; there is llans Meyrick, with his quaint talk and
reckless artistic temperament, witty, fantastic, full of carping selfish-
nesses and sudden returns of generosity. These and other vivacious
figures are brought before us, and play their parts, and have their
looks and attitudes described, their thoughts and motives analysed,
with only too abundant patience and brilliancy of workmanship.

X^or — to pass from considering what the author has to tell us, and
to consider how she tells it — is not her fault this, to be too prodigal
of her resources, too prone to over-say things, and to turn the same
thing many ways about ? To bear so hard, and say all that can be
said, on every occasion, is to run the risk of fatiguing. It seems to
have been commonly felt that “ Daniel Dcronda ” is written with too
little ease and too much insistance, and that a style always full and
elaborate has become in this book more full and elaboiAe than ever,
and more charged with allusions and technicalities. The march not
only of the story, but of the sentences themselves, often seems clogged
with superfluous thought. Thinking, one may say, is of three
kinds. One kind of thinking brings ideas into new relations, and
so throws a new light on the relations of things themselves. It is
needless to say, of any work of George Eliot, that it abounds with
this best, this luminous kind of thinking, with originality, and
brilliant sayings on life and human nature. Some of them, indeed,
may seem a little cumbrously expressed, as thus :

** Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many things at once
referred to the clumsy nocossitics of action and not to the subtler possibilities
of feeling. \Ye cannot spoak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill
and not kill in the same moment ; but a moment is room wide enough for the
loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp
backward stroke of repentance.”

Or again, in the analysis of the vice of egoism : —

An imaginary envy, the idea that others feel their comparative deficiency,
is the ordinaiy^ cortege of egoism.”

Here is a fine observation without a word amiss

The subtly- varied drama between man and woman is often such as can
hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, according to obvious
fixed marks. The word-of-all-work Love will no more express the myriad
modes of mutual attraction, than the word Thought can inform you what is
passing through your neighbour’s mind.”

AaA Itere another : —

BAmEL DEBOXDA.

'611

** It liappened to Deronda at this moment, as it has often happened to others,
that the niedfw e^eeeh nwde an epoch in reeolve* Tfia respect for the questioner
would not let hm decline to answer, and by the necessity to answer he found
out the truth for himself.”

With these and a hundred more such observations we shall certainly
not quarrel, even if we do not always find them quite felicitously
expressed as the last two. The next kind of thinking is that which,
without actually giving us new ideas, brings out by analysis the full
bearings and contents of a familiar idea. This also is excellent in its
place. George Eliot seldom passes over any idea whatever without
working it out in this way, and we shall presently have occasion to
examine a characteristic example from ‘^Daniel Deronda.” But
there'is a third kind of thinking which is surely never to be applauded,
and that is when a simple thing is made abstruse by being put into
a laboured form or commented on in artificial language. Then we
have only what looks like, and is not really, thought. For instance,
is there any real substance in this refiection, when Daniel has said
he will wait after Christmas, to do something he does not care
about : —

« Wbat sbould wo all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a
disagreeable duty!'* The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by
which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is
hardly worth while to set about anything wo are disinclined to.”

If this docs not really tell us anything, still less are we pleased
when ugly technicalities like the following are employed to give
body and point to ordinary reflections. My plan is to do what I
please,” says the beautiful and saucy Gwendolin, and the author
adds this comment : —

** (Here should any young lady incline to imitate Gwendolen, let her consider
the set of her neck : if the angle there had been different, the chin protrusive
and the cervical vertobrm a trifle more curved in their position, ten to one
Gwendolen’s words would have had a jar in them for the sweet-natured Bex.) ”

That, I think, is in not at all a good manner, and still worse is it
when, instead of being told that a certain Miss Juliet Fenn is plain,
we are told that she is a young lady whose profile has been
unfavourably decided by circumstances over which she had no control.”
This is reaUy but a heavy and inferior kind of smartness. Our
complaint is of another kind when we find the analysis of characters
and motives expressed in too technical terms of philosophy.
George EUot is such a mistress of character and motive, and can
give the key to them with such a happy ease when she likes, in
language which every one can imderstand, that one is doubly
perplexed when she pauses to use a cumbrous and scholastic diction.
Take the following, of Grandcourt : — ” * Damn her,* thought Grand-
court — he waa not a wordy thinker ” ; of Lush : — “ he had still a sense

VOL. XX. 3I.S. T T

612

DANIEL DEBONDA.

ofueholanhip when he woe not trying to remember much of it ” ; of Mrs.
DayiloWy wlien her sister has said it would be a mercy if Gwendolen
were well married: — '^to this Mrs. BayiloWy discerning some
criticism of her darling in the fervour of that wish, had not chosen
to make any audible reply, though she had said inwardly, ^ You will
not get her to marry for your pleasure' ; the mild mother becoming
rather saucy when she identified herself with her daughter ^ What can
be more luminous or better said P On the other hand, what can be
more cumbrous than this, from one of the many psychological
studies of Deronda P — “ A too diffusive and reflective sympathy was
in danger of paralysing in him that indignation against wrong and
that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force."
And this is but a mild example of what abounds in the book. The
author talks somewhere of a phrase like intending bridegrooms "
as belonging to the new English " ; and in a few pages on uses,
once out of many times, the word aloofness." Is aloofness classical P
and is ‘Hhe deducible satisfactoriness of things in general,"
or ''the insistent penetration of suppressed experience," a good
phrase P is not “ emotive memory " the language of a school P is there
not obscurity in the systole and diastole of blissful companionship " P
And the same partiality to difficult words. enters into and sometimes
spoils even the talk of her characters.

To the work of a great writer how, with any show of grace or
modesty, shall one make objections like these P In Landor's
immortal dialogue, Diogenes, a person licensed to carp and to
presume, finds fault with the style of Plato. Let us creep with
Diogenes into his tub, and assume his impudence, and say, ^‘If
what is occult must be occult for ever, why throw away words
about it P Employ on every occasion the simplest and easiest, and
range them in the most natural order. Thus they will serve thee
faithfully, and bring thee many hearers and readers. . . . All
popular orators, victorious commanders, crowned historians, and
poets above crowning, have done it." Crowned historians, and poets
above crowning — ^these are the proper company for George Eliot,
and therefore it cannot but distress us when she seems to use a
language which is not theirs. Therefore we make so bold as to
wish she would always say simple things simply, and difficult things
so as to be understood not only by a school or generation, but by
all men and all times. We want to feel sure that what she writes
will live, and we cannot feel sure that writing wiU live in which the
thought is laboured and the expression more. Consider the following
passage, from the opening chapter of the eighth book of Daniel
Deronda : —

Eadension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the
length of the sun’s journeying con no more tell us how &r life has advanced

DANIEL DEBONDA.

613

than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it.
A man may go north, and, stumbling over a bone, may meditate over it until
he has found a new starting-point for anatomy ; or eastward, and discover a
new key to language tolling a new story of races ; or he may head an expedition
that opens new continental pathways, get himself maimed in body, oLd go
through a whole heroic poem of resolve and endurance ; and at the end of a few
months he may come back to find his neighbours grumbling at the same parish
grievance as before, or to see the same elderly gendeman treading the pavement
in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive butcher’s
boy, and pausing at the same shopwindow to look at the same prints. If the
s^Bv^st thinking has almost the pace of a greyhound, the slowest must be
supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which after a good
w]^e is discerned to be a slight progression. Such differences are manifest in
the variable intensity which wo call human experience, from the revolutionary
rush of change which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence
of ^ the familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger land the
heavens.”

And now compare this with the form in which another writer,
also a novelist and a woman, expresses, where she has occasion to
express it, the same general idea. George Sand, some nun bringing up
sit a time of distress the old consolation that life is short, reflects : —

** Yes, quiet life is short. In the slumber of the spirit fifty years pass like a
day ; but the life of emotions and events can gather into a day whole centuries
of trouble and endurance.”^

What a difference is here ! How flowingly the French writer
makes her reflection and passes on ! How the English writer elaborates
hers, and what a quantity of things she gives us to think about and
pause over, insisting that we shall see all the contents and bearings-
of tho idea ! Beginning with the technicalities extension and

acreage,^’ sho next cites particular achievements such as change
the world and make life feel full to tho doer, and sets us wondering
what cases were in her mind, and thinking about Sir William Jones
and Dr. Livingstone and Lieutenant Cameron. Then she conjures
up a detailed and humorous picture of tho pursuits of others whose
lives are empty tho while, and who stay at home scarcely aware of
the march of time. The old gentleman and the butcher’s boy are
good, and make us laugh, though percussive,” of butcher’s boys, is
perhaps rather a thing to say than to write. Next, the idea is farther
illustrated with the similes of the greyhound and the limpet, which
are to the purpose and pleasantly expressed. And lastly, the whole
thought is resumed in a sentence of somewhat involved psychology..
Now I do not urge that an idea should never be elaborated, and
it includes brought out, in this exhaustive way, only that continually
to do this gives us a senso of strain and effort, and that strain and
effort seem to mo qualities which are growing in George Eliot’s work

(1) Oai, la vie poisible eat courte. Oinquante ans passent comme un jour dans le
Boxnmeil de rdmo ; mais la vie d'^motions ct d*6vdnemonts resume en un jour des siddeB
de malaise et do fatignie.”— George Sand, Histoiro do ma Yie,” voL iii. p. IdS.

T t2

614

DANIEL DERONDA.

to its injury. One cannot help wishingi of this great spiriti that
its tension might sometimes seem relaxed ; one cannot^ as one reads,
help thinking of that other manner in which everything is said — so
much of the thing as is wanted and no more — ^perfectly and easily,
and then left. The art of fiction has reached its highest point in
the hands of two women in our tiine. One of them has just been
taken away, and as we read the work of the other who is left, it is
natural that wo should have hers also in our mind. Their excellences
are in few things the same. The flow of George Eliot’s writing,
we have felt, is apt to be impeded with excess of thought, while of
writing which does flow, and in flowing carry the readgr delightfully
along, George Sand is an incomparable mistress. But this is only
the sign of deeper difierences. George Sand excels in the poetiqal
part of her art. George EHot excels in the philosophical. Each is
equally mistress of human nature and its secrets, but the one more
by instinct, the other more by reflection. In everything which is
properly matter of the intellect, the English writer is the superior
of the French by far. She stands on diflerent and firmer philosophical
ground. George Sand had known and shared the two great intel-
lectual fevers of her time in France — the social fever of those who
hoped to end the unequal reign of wealth and privilege, and by
remodelled institutions to make human brotherhood a reality ; and
the religious fever of those who, breaking with churches and abandon-
ing the incredible, yet sought an anchorage for the individual soul
in communion with a deity above the definition of dogma. Much
of George Sand’s work has in it the ferment of these two doctrines
— socialism and theism — but without, perhaps, gaining from the
admixture. The quality of her speculative reflections is not on a level
with the quality of her creations ; she imagines much better than
she thinks. On the other hand, it is not only that George Eliot is
of a diflerent genius, and thinks at least as well as she imagines ; it
is that she belongs to a school with which most of uer to-day are
more in sympathy, and which, whether we hold its principles final
or not, at any rate stands on solid ground, and tells us things fruit-
ful in practice and luminous as far as they reach. She is penetrated
with the scientific spirit, and the conclusions of the scientific spirit,
in their most comprehensive, most ardent, most generous shape, form
the moral and intellectual foundation of her art. Only, such is the
nature of art, that when it too much lays bare its own moral
and intellectual foundations, it produces less effect than when it
conceals them. George Eliot, while she speaks much more to our
understanding, never speaks to our imagination in so pure, single,
and harmonious a way as George Sand. I do not know that any
one'of the many and noble lessons of George Eliot is brought home
to us so perfectly as that one which George Sand had at heart — the

DAJ^IBL BEBONBA.

616

lesson that a woman must begin her own emancipation by ceasing to
hold herself a slave and cheap ; that she must become a free, rei^n-
sible, individual human being, recognising her own sacredness, being
no more ready to give herself in carelessness to the first asker than
to sell herself in infamy to the first bidder, but putting devotion to
the proof, judging before she chooses, living her own life, and valuing
her own soul. From romances so different as ^^Mauprat” and

Mademoiselle Merquem,” this one moral results in unescapeable
evidence and in a light that never fades from our mind. For
George Sand is so much of a poet and artist, that every touch of
her work helps instinctively to the effect, every image is conceived
in relation to the whole, nothing comes to jar or distract us. In the
work of George Eliot, moral and philosophical problems do not
clothe themselves, with the same certainty of instinct, in appropriate
artistic forms. We have passages of first-rate art side by side with
passages of philosophy ; and sometimes the philosophy comes where
we want the art, and gives us a character like Daniel Deronda
himself, who seems constructed rather than created.

In the power, again, of conjuring up moving images, of bringing
her personages before us in situations and attitudes of beauty and an
exquisite romantic charm, George Sand is unrivalled. That is a power
which we miss in Daniel Deronda more than in some of the pre-
vious novels of George Eliot. Some of the pictures of Gwendolen have
great beauty and cling to us, especially those where she lies anxious
“ in her little white bed ” beside her mother ; or where, early in the
book, she looks lovely and vigorous as a tall, newly-opened lily ”
in the morning ; or where, near its close, we see her in her misery
like a lost, weary, storm-beaten white doe, unable to rise and
pursue its unguided way.’^ But those of Mirah somehow fail,
and I do not think there is anything in this book so sweet as the
picture, in Felix Holt,” of Esther Lyon dressing her father’s
silver hair, or of Dorothea in her night of agony, in Middlemarch.”
In the scene of most emotion and crisis in the book — ^that of the
parting and the kiss between Gwendolen and Deronda — wo have
this : —

Sobs rose, and groat tears fell fast. Deronda would not let her hands go-—
held them still with one of his, and himself pressed her handkerchief against
her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child, making an efibrt to speak,
which was hindered by struggling sobs. At last she succeeded in saying
brokenly — * I said ... I said .... it should be better . . . better with me
... for having known you.’ His eyes too were large with tears. She
wrested one of her hands from his, and returned his action, pressing the tears
away.”

That has force and noble passion, but in the attitudes, the picture,
there is a something wrong, a commonness ; the poets among novelists,
a Walter Scott, a George Sand, would never have conceived it just

616

DAmEL DEBOITDA.

SO ; we tl'inlr of the meeting of Diana Yemon and Frank on the
heath at night, when she stoops her &ce to his— of the first kiss of
Yalentine and Benedict in the farmer’s cottage — and we are aware
of a wondrons difference.

(leorge Sand, in one class of her noyels, has invested with an
imperis^ble charm the country scenery and country life of her
native province of Berry. George Eliot has almost done as much
for certain comers of the English midlands. A book like tiie
“Mill on the Floss” contains pages (but we miss such pages in
Daniel Deronda) of description as perfect, as just, as full of tender-
ness, as anything in “Fran9ois le Champi,” “La petite Fadette,”
or the rest of that delightful group. But, except the beautiful
“ Weaver of Baveloe,” no tale of George Eliot’s has the same art and
unity as these, none leaves us with the same charmed and touched
impression, and none is written with the same instinct for contriving
and chaining together situations of natural beauty and emotion,
nor conducted from opening to close with anything like the same
harmonious skill. On the other hand, every work of Gkorge Eliot
is rich with a multitude of things which the work of George
Sand does not contain—scenos of various and abundant comedy,
homely humour of the soil and trained humour of the author’s own,
wit and wisdom, sarcasm and sympathy, a crowd of subordinate
characters all standing out in the sharpest definition, and every
character not only exhibited but dissected, every action and motive
not only displayed but scientifically named and analysed. To each
her crown; and of what has above been said of the author of
“Daniel Deronda,” may nothing count as said in breach of the
grateful reverence and affection which firom all of ns are hers.

Sidney Colvin.

THE FUTURE OP POLITICAL ECONOMY,^

The year 1876 is remarkable as being the bundredth anniversary of
at least two important events. On tbe other side of the Atlantic, the
Americans are celebrating the birth of a great nation. On this side
of the water we ought to be celebrating the publication of a great
book — a book to which we owe, in as great a degree as to any other
'oircumstance, the wealth and prosperity of this kingdom. It is
curious to observe, indeed, that these two centenaries are in a certain
respect antithetic to each other. While we attribute our wealth to
the establishment of the free trade principles which Smith advocated,
the American Government yet maintains a fiscal i^stemin direct and
avowed antagonism to those principles.

The enormous wealth of the United States has been created by the
freedom and energy of internal trade acting upon natural resources
of unexampled ric^ess. It cannot for a moment be doubted that
their wealth would be far greater still were external commerce in the
States as free as internal commerce. To us, dwelhng and working
in this comparatively speaking very small island, endowed with no
remarkable natural resources, except coal and iron, — ^to us, the
freedom of external commerce is everything. This freedom we may
properly attribute to the writings of Adam Smith, even more than to
the labours of Gladstone, or Cobden, or Bright, or any of the great
statesmen who actually carried the doctrines of Smith into effect.

We ought, therefore, to be celebrating the publication of the

Wealth of Nations,” and the memory of its author ; but are we
doing so ? With a single exception, I am unacquainted with any
public ceremony, or anything tending to mark this as a centennM
year in Great Britain. Perhaps this is because we are not a people
accustomed to commemorations of the sort. If I recollect rightly,
even the Shakesperean jubilee was rather a failure. However this
may bo, there has been one exception, and that was a most suitable
commemoration of Adam Smith. On the 31st of May last, the Political
Economy Club held a grand dinner and a special discussion in
honour of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the
« Wealth of Nations.”

Probably, when people saw this dinner described in the news-
papers, their first thought was, ^^What is the Political Economy
Club P Wo never heard of it before.” I may, therefore, explain
briefly, that the Political Economy Club has pursued an incon-
spicuous, but very useful career for more than half a century.

(1) Introductory Lecture at the opening of the Session 1876 — 7, at Uniyersity Col-
lege, London, Faculty of Arts and Laws.

618

THE PUTUEE OP POLITTCA-L ECOEOMT.

Whether its, continued existence be due to the excellence of its
xnonthly dinnersi— -in respect of which the club does not seem
to study economy— or to the interest of the economical debates which
follow each dinner^ I will not attempt to decide. Certain it is, how-
ever, that the club was founded in the year 1821 by Bicardo,
Malthus, Tooke, James Mill, Grote, Cazenove, and other dis-
tinguished men, and that since its foundation it has included as
members nearly all English political economists. John Stuart Mill
especially was, for many years, a leading member, and first pro-
pounded at its table the doctrines advocated in his economical works. *
It was no doubt most suitable that such a body should celebrate
the establishment in England of the science they cultivate, and the
centenary dinner held last May was in some respects a very remark-
able one. Mr. Gladstone was in the chair, with Mr. Lowe on the
one hand, and M. L^on Say, the present French Minister of Finance,
on the other hand. The company included a body of statesmen,
economists, and statists, British, Continental, and American, such as
are seldom seen together. It is true that the statesmen had it mostly
their own way, and in the presence of Gladstone and Lowe, and a
real French Minister of Finance, the company appeared to care little
what mere literary economists thought about Adam Smith. But I
shall on the present occasion be so bold as incidentally to review and
criticize some of the opinions which were put forth at the dinner, a
full and carefully revised report of the speeches having been printed
by Messrs. Longman, under the superintendence of the committee
of the club.

Mr. Lowe opened the debate in a most interesting survey and
eulogium of Adam Smith and his works. He concluded with some
remarks upon the results which have followed from Smith’s writings,
and upon what yet remains to be achieved by political economy. I
was much struck with the desponding tone in which Mr. Lowe
spoke of the future of the science I have the honour to teadi in this
college. He seems- to think that the work of the science is to a
great extent finished. He said : —

** 1 do not myself feel very sanguine that there is a very large field— at least,
according to the present state of mental and commercial knowledge— for poli-
tical economy, beyond what I have mentioned ; but I think that very much
depends upon the degree in which other sciences are developed. Should other
sciences relating to mankind, which it is the barbarous jargon of the day to call
Sociology, take a spring and get forward in any degree towards the certainty
attained by political economy, I do not doubt that their development would help
in the development of this science; but at present, so far as my own humble
opinion goes, I am not sanguine as to any very large or any very startling
development of political economy. I observe that the triumphs which have
been gained, have been rather in demolishing that which has been found to be
undoubtedly bad and erroneous, than in establishing new truth ; and imagine
that, before we can attain new results, we must be furnished from without with

XHE TUTUBE 07 POLHIOAL ECONOICT.

619

new truths to whidi our principles may be applied. The controyersies which
we now have in political economy, although they offer a capital exerdse for the
logical faculties, are not of the same ttunUing importance as those of earlier
days ; the great work has been done.”

I am far from denying that there is much to support, or at any
rate to suggest, this view of the matter. Some of the greatest
reforms which economists can point out the need of have been accom-
plished, and there is certainly no single work to be done com-
parable to the establishment of free trade. But this does not prevent
the existence of an indefinitely great sphere of useful work which
economists could accomplish, if their science were adequate to its
duties. To a certain extent, again, I agree with Mr. Lowe that
there is much in the present position of our science to cause
despondency. A very general impression to this effect seems to
exist. Some of the newspapers hinted in reference to the centenary
dinner that the political economists had better bo celebrating the
obsequies of their science than its jubilee. The TalUMall Gazette
especially thought that Mr. Lowe’s task was to explain the decline,
not the consummation, of economical science. Perhaps with many
people the wish was father of the thought. I am aware that political
economists have always been regarded as cold-blooded beings, devoid
of the ordinary feelings of humanity — little better, in fact, than
vivisectionists. I believe that the general public would be happier
in their minds for a little time if political economy could be shown
up as imposture, like the greater part of what is called spiritualism.

It must be allowed, too, that there have been for some years back
premonitory symptoms of disruption of the old orthodox school of
economists. Bespect for the names of Ricardo and Mill seems no
longer able to preserve unanimity. J. S. Mill himself, in the later
years of his life, gave up one of the doctrines on which he had placed
much importance in his works. One economist after another —
Thornton, Cairnes, Leslie, Macleod, Longe, Hearn, Musgrare — ^have
protested against some one or other of the articles of the old Ricardian
creed.

At the same time foreign economists, such as De Laveleye,
Courcelle-Seneuil, Cournot, Walras, and others, have taken a course
almost entirely independent of the predominant English school. So
far has this discontent gone, that Mr. Bagehot has been induced to
re-examine the fundamental postulates of economy from their very
foundation, in his most acute papers published in the Fortnightly
Review. He remarks (p. 216, Feb. 1, 1876) : —

** Notwithstanding these triumphs, the position of our political economy is
not altogether satisfactory. It lies rather dead in the public mind. Not only
it does not excite the same interest as formerly, but ^ere is not exactly the
same confidence in it. Younger men either do not study it, or do not feel that
it comes home to them, and that it matches with their most living ideas

620

THE r UTUBE OF POLITIGAL EOOKOHT.

They adc, often hardly knorng it, ynil this * Scienoe,’ as it daims to be»
hannonize with what we now know to be sciences, or bear to be tried as we now
try sdenoes? And they are not sure of the answer.”

In short, it comes to this — ^that one hundred years after the i^st
publication of the Wealth of Nations/’ we find the state of the
science to be almost chaotic. There is certainly less agreement now
about what political economy is than there was thirty or fifty years
ago. lender these circumstances, I will now draw your attention
for a short time to the apparently riyal sects which seem likely to
arise from the break up of the old Bicardian school.

In the first place, it is impossible to ignore the fact that there has
been gradually rising into prominence a school of writers who take
a Tery radical yiew of the reforms required in our science. They
call in question the yalidity eyen of the deductiye method on which
Smith mainly relied. They hold that the scienoe must be entirely
recast in method and materials, and that it must take the form of an
historical or archaeological science. At the centenary dinner this
yiew of the matter was boldly stated by one of the most distinguished
of European economists — ^namely, M. de Layeleye. His own words,
tranidated into English, will best explain his opinions : —

** It is principally at this point that thoro has recently arisen a division in tho
ranks of economists. Some, the old school, whom, for want of a better name, 1
will call the Orthodox School, belieyo that everything regulates itself by the
effect of natural laws. The other school, which its adversaries have named the
Socialists of the Chair, the * Eatheder-sociaJisten,* but which we ought rather to
call the Historical School, or as the Germans say, the ‘ Bealist ^hool ; * this
school holds that distribution is governed in part doubtless by f^e contract ;
but also, and still moxe, by civil and political institutions, by religious beHeft,
by moral sentiments, by custom and historical tradition. You see that there
opens itself here an immense field of studies, comprehending the relations of
political economy with morals, justice, right, religion, history, and connecting
it to the ensemble of social science, l^at in my humble opinion is the actual
mission of political economy. This is tho path pursued by nearly all German
economists, several of whom have a European reputation, such as j^u, Boscher,
Enies, Nasse, Schaffle, SchmoUer ; in Italy by a group of writers afi^ady well
known, Minghetti, Luzzati, Forti ; in France, by Wolowski, Lavergne, Passy,
Gourcelle-Seneuil, Leroy-Beaulieu ; and in England by authors, whom it is
mmecessary to name or estimate here, because you know them better than I.”

Tbere is certainly no difficulty in mentioning a series of dis-
tinguidied English economists who baye shown a propensity to the
historical treateent of the science. To begin with, A. Smith would
no doubt be claimed by the historical school, for there is a strong
historical element running through his book. Not only does The
Wealth of Nations ” contain special historical inquiries like that con-
odming the value of silver, the chapter on agricultural systems, or
the whole book upon The Different Progress of Opulence in Different
Nationsf,” but the whole work teems with concrete illustrations or
veriffications drawn from the history of many countries. As has

THE FUTUBE OF FOLHIOAL BOONOMT. 621

been well remarked, Adam Smith had some of the many-BLdedness
at which all have wondered in Shakespeare, and it is singular testi-
mony to the completeness of his method, that while Mr. Lowe
claimed him, and I think correctly, as a deductive economist, another
speaker. Professor Eogers, held him to be the practical Bacon of
economical science. The fact, I believe, is that Smith combined
deductive reasoning with empirical verification in the manner
required by the complete inductive method.

But to proceed, we find that the essay of Malthus on Popula-
tion far from being, as many people probably suppose, a coUeotion
of rash generalisations and hypotheses, consists mainly of a most
careful inquiry into historical and statistical facts concerning the
numbers and conditions of mankind in all parts of the world. It is
a model of inductive inquiry so far as information was available in
his day. The essay of Eichard Jones on the '^Distribution of
Wealth and the Forms of Land Tenure in Difierent Countries,’’ is
a far less celebrated book, but displays the same careful spirit of
inquiry into the past or present condition of men. Mr. Samuel
Laing, again, in his well-known and most interesting works, takes
the same position, and has studied upon the spot the economy of
I^orway, Sweden, France, Prussia, and Switzerland, somewhat in the
manner that Arthur Young studied France and Great Britain in the
last century. The general conclusion of Mr. Laing is that every
country has a political economy of its own, suitable to its own
physical circumstances and its own national character.

Passing over the minor works of Banfield, Burton, and others, it
is impossible to overlook the recent admirable research of Professor
Thorold Eogers, "On the History of Agriculture and Prices in
England, from 1259 to 1400 ” (published by the Clarendon Press).
In this book Professor Eogen has certainly pursued the historical
and inductive method with unbounded industry and remarkable
success. He has made us better acquainted with the economy of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than we are with that of the
eighteenth. In the fascinating works of Sir Henry Maine, too,
especially his last work on " The Early History of Institutions,”
there is much historical inquiry bearing upon economical science.

Perhaps the most recent of all declarations in favour of the
inductive study of the laws of wealth, is that of Sir George
Campbell, who in his inaugural address as President of the Eco-
nomical and Statistical Section of the British Association, at the late
Glasgow meeting, spoke as follows

" There was a time when it seems to have been supposed that political
economy was a science rogolated by natural laws, so fixed that satb results
could be attained by deductive reasoning. But since it has become apparent
that men do not in &ct invariably follow the laws of money-making, pure and
simple, that economic action is affected by moral causes which cannot be ezobtly

m

THE PUTUBE OF POIITIOAL ECONOMY.

measnredi it becomes more and more evident, that vre cannot safely trost to a

diain of deduction; we must test every step by an accurate observation of facts,

and induction from them.”

Upon this and other statements I shall haye to make some
remarks presently.

It is, however, Professor Oliffe Leslie who has placed himself at
the front of the inductive and historical school of economists in this
country, by the thoroughness as well as the ability of the essay in
which he declares his revolt from the old orthodox school. In
a remarkable paper, printed in the Dublin University essays
publidied under the title of Hermathena,^’ he calls in question
altogether the validity of the deductive reasoning which Mr. Lowe
considered the most valuable feature in the Wealth of Nations.*’
He considers the generally-recognised laws of economy to be rude
generalisations, obtained by a superficial and unphilosophical pro-
cess of abstraction. No attempt, he thinks, has been made to
measure the relative force of economical principles in different states
of society, or to allow for multitudes of disturbing causes.

**Had the actual operation of tho motives in question/’ be says, **been
investigated, it would bave been seen to vary widely in different states of
society, and under different conditions. Tbe love of distinction, or of social
position, for example, may either counteract tbe desire of wealth, or greatly add
to its force as a motive to industry and accumulation. It may lead one man
to make a fortune, another to spend it. At tbe bead of tbe inquiry into the
causes on which tbe amount of tbe wealth of nations depends is tbe problem —
what are tbe conditions which direct tbe energies and determine the actual
occupations and pursuits of mankind in different ages and countries ?”....
‘‘Enough,” be continues, “has been said in proof that tho abstract a pnbn
and deductive method yields no explanation of the causes which regulate either

the nature or the amount of wealth The truth is, that the whole

economy of every nation, as regards the occupations and pursuits of both sexes,
tho nature, amount, distribution, and consumption of wealth, is the result of a
long evolution, in which there has been bofh continuity and change, and of
which the economical side is only a particular aspect or phase. And the laws
of which it is the result must be sought in history, and the general laws of
society and social evolution.”

These extracts indicate the line of thought by which Professor
Ledie has been led to regard the g^eral theorems of Ricardo as
mere guesses,” and the deductive theory of political economy as
barren, if not false. Now I am far from thinking that the historical
treatment of our smence is false or usdess. On tiie contrary, I con-
sider it to be indi^nsable. The present economical state of society
cannot possibly be ^cplained by theory alone. We must take into
account the long past, out of which we are constantly emerging.
Whether we call it sociology or not, we must have some soientifio
treatment of the principles of evolution as manifested in every
h^andb.of social existence. Accordingly, M. de Lavdeye, Professor
C9i& Leslie, or M. Lavergne, may very properly do for political

THE FUTUBM OP POLITICAL ECONOMY.

economy what Sir Henry Maine has done for jurispnidence —
namely, show that every law, custom, or social fact is the product
of the past, historical or forgotten.

But it is surprising how often men, even of the highest powers,
fall into a logical fallacy which has not, I think, been dubbed with
any special name, but might fitly be called the fallacy of exelmivencHs.
There are too many in the present day who advocate the teaching
of physical science, and imply in the mode of their advocacy that
moral, classical, or other studies are to be discountenanced. It is
most common to find people speaking of inductive reasoning, as if
it were entirely distinct and opposite to deductive reasoning, the fact
being, however, as I believe, that deduction is a necessary element
of induction.

In these and many other cases, people argue, more or less con-
sciously, that because a certain thing is true or useful, therefore
other things are not true or not useful. Some tendency of this
sort might be suspected by the reader of the last two chapters of
Sir Henry Maine’s “ Early History of Institutions,” in which he
discusses the relation of his own historical treatment of juris-
prudence to the systems of Hobbos, Bentham, and especially Austin.
Sir Henry Maine has conclusively shown that the investigation of
the origin and development of law is essential to the understanding
of the jurisprudence of any people ; but it does not follow, and I do
not understand Sir Henry Maine to assert, that an abstract and per-
fect scheme of jurisprudence, like that which Austin gave to the
world in this college, is therefore devoid of truth and usefulness.
Now the case of political economy is exactly parallel to this.

I cannot easily conceive any more interesting or useful subject
of study than that which Professor Leslie advocates and engages
in. It is absolutely essential that we should view the present by the
light of the past ; but I differ from him entirely when he holds that
historical political economy is to destroy and replace the abstract
theory which has previously held the place of the science. Does
it follow that because pala5ontology is now established as an all-
important science of an historical character, therefore animal physi-
ology, or the chemistry of animal substances, is false P Any group
of objects may be studied, either as regards the laws of action of
their component parts, irrespective of time, or as regards the suc-
cessive forms produced from time to time under the action of those
laws. Now the laws of political economy treat of the relations
between human wants and the available natural objects and human
labour by which they may be satisfied. These laws are so simple
in their foundation that they would apply, more or less completely,
to all human beings of whom we have any knowledge. The laws
of property are very different in different countries and states of

624 ^ tee FUTUBB of POimOAL economt.

society. Tli jy seem to be in a yery rudimentary state among the
Eskimo. According to Dr. Binks^ if one Eskimo man has two boats
and another has none, the latter has a right to borrow one of the
two boats ; and it is further said that it is not the custom among
the Eskimo to return borrowed articles. Kow this is of course a
Tory difiS^rent state of things from what obtains among us. Neyer-
thelesB we can trace in this transaction of the borrowed boat the
simple principles which are at the basis of economy. The most
fundamental of its laws is that of Senior and Banfield — ^namely,
that human wants are limited in extent. One boat is yery useful,
if not essential, to an Eskimo ; a second boat is much less useful to
a man who has already one boat, but it is highly useful if passed
into the hands of a bbatless neighbour. The elements of yalue are
present hero as in the most complicated operations of our com or
stock exchanges. I should not despair of tracing the action of the
postulates of political economy among some of the more intelligent
classes of animals. Dogs certainly have strong though perhaps
limited ideas of property, as you will soon discover if you interfero
between a dog and his bone.

I come to the conclusion, then, that the first principles of political
economy are so widely true and applicable, that they may be con-
sidered universally true as regards human nature. Historical
political economy, so far from displacing the theory of economy, will
only exhibit and verify the long-continued action of its laws in most
widely [different states of society. M. de Lavelcyo and Professor
Leslie may succeed in constituting a new science, but they will not
utterly revolutionise and destroy the old one in the way they seem
to suppose.

The fact is it will no longer be possible to treat political economy
as if it were a single undivided and indivisible science. The advan-
tages of the division of labour are] as great and indispensable in the
pursuit of knowledge as in manual industry ; and it is 6at of the
question that political economy alone should fail to avail itself of
these advantages. Differentiation, as Mr. Spencer would say, must
go on. I should be afraid of tiring you if I were to attempt to
trace out in detail the several divisions into which political economy
will naturally fall apart. Not only will there be a number of
branches, but there are actually two or three different ways in
which the division will take place.

There is, firstly, the old distinction of the laws of the science,
according as they treat of the production,' exchange, distribution,
or consumption of wealth. In this respect economy may be regarded
as an aggregate of two or more different sciences, there being, in
&ot, little connection between the principles which should g;uide us
in production, and those which apply in distribution or consumption.

THE PUTUBE OP POXITIGAL ECONOHY.

625

To readers of J. S. Mill’s ''Principles of Political Economy/’
indeed, it may sound strange to hear of consumption as one of the
chief branches of the science. Though named last, as being last in
/the order of time, consumption is evidently the most important of
the . processes through which commodities pass, because things are
only produced in order that they may be consumed usefully. It is
unaccountable, then, and quite paradoxical, that Englirii economists
should, with few exceptions, ignore the most important branch of
their own science, especially after it has been duly treated by
J. B. Say, Storch, Courcelle-Seneuil, and many other continents
writers, as well as by the excellent Australian economist. Professor
Hearn.

Passing now to a second aspect, political economy will naturally be
divided according as it is abstract or concrete. The theory of the
science consists of those gonerS laws which are so simple in nature,
and so deeply grounded in the constitution of man and the outer
world, that they remain the same throughout SI those ages which are
within our consideration. But though tho laws are the same they
may receive widely different applications in the concrete. The
primary laws of motion are the same, whether they bo applied to
solids, liquids, or gases, though the phenomena obeying those laws
are apparently so different. Just as there is a genorS science of
mechanics, so we must have a general science or theory of economy.
Here, agSn, there is a division of opinion. There are those who
think that, dealing as the science does with quantities, economy must
necessarily be a mathematical science, if it is anything at all. There
are those, on the other hand, who, like the late Professor Caimes,
contest, and some who even ridicule, the notion of representing
truths relating to human affairs in mathematical symbols. It may
be safely asserted, however, that if English economists persist in
rejecting the mathematical view of their science, they will fall
behind their European contemporaries. How many English students,
or even professors, I should like to know, have sought out the papers
of tho late Dr. Whewell, printed in the Cambridge Philosophical
Transactions^ in which he gives his view of the mode of applying
mathematics to our science ? What English publisher, I may ask
again, would for a moment entertain the idea of reprinting a series
of mathematical works on political economy P Tet this is what is
being done in Italy by Professor Gerolamo Boccardo, the very
learned and distinguished editor of the "I^uova Enciclopedia
Italiana.” Professor Boccardo has also prefixed to the series a
-remarkable treatise of his own on the application of the quantitative
method to economic and social science in general. This series, which
forms the third portion of the well-known "Bibliotheca Economista,”
will be completed with an Italian translation of the works of Pro-

626

THE rUTUBE OF POIHIGiLL EGOKOMY*

fessor L^on Walras, now Bector of the Academy of Lausanne, who
has in recent years independently established the fact that the laws of
supply and demand, and all the phenomena of value, may be investi-
gated algebraically and illustrated geometrically. From inquiries
of this sort the curious conclusion emerges, that equilibrium of
exchange of goods resembles in mathematical conditions the equi-
librium of weights upon a lever of the first order. In the latter
case one weight multiplied by its arm must exactly equal the other
weight multiplied by its arm. So, in an act of exchange, the
commodity given multiplied by its degree of utility must equal the
quantity of commodity received multiplied by its degree of utility.
The theory of economy proves to be, in fact, the mechanics of utility
and self-interest.

Now, too, that attention is at last being given to the mathematical
character of the science, it is becoming apparent that a series of
writers in France, Germany, Italy, and England have made attempts
towards a mathematical theory. Their works have been almost
unnoticed, or, at any rate, forgotten, mainly on account of the
prejudice against the line of inquiry they adopted. It is much to
be desired that some competent mathematician and economist should
seek these works out and prepare a compendious abstract of their
contents, in the manner of Mr. Todhunter’s valuable histories of
mathematical science. On the present occasion I cannot do more
than mention the names of some of the principal writers referred to,
such as Lang, Krceneke, Buquoy, Dupuit, Von Thiinen, Cazaux,
Cournot, and Francesco Fuoco, on the Continent, and Whewell,
Tozer, Lardner, Perronet Thompson, Fleming Jenkin, Alfred
Marshall, and probably others, in Great Britain.

So much for the theory of economy which will naturally be one
science, remaining the same throughout its applications, though it
may be broken up into several parts, the theories of utility, of
exchange, of labour, of interest, &c., partly corresponding to the old
division of the science into the laws of consumption, exchange, dis-
tribution, production, and so forth. Concrete political economy,
however, can hardly be called one science, but already consists of
many extensive branches of inquiry. Currency, banking, the rela-
tions of labour and capital, those of landlord and tenant, pauperism,
taxation, and finance, are some of the principal portions of applied
political economy, all involving the same ultimate laws, manifested
in most different circumstances. In a subject of such appalling
extent and complexity as currency, for instance, we depend upon the
laws of supply and demand, of consumption and production of com-
modities as applied to the precious metals or other materials of
In the science of banking and the money market, we have a
very difficult application of the same laws to capital in general.

THE FUTUEB OF POLITICAL ECOKOHY.

627

This separation of the concrete branches of the science is, however,
sufficiently obvious and recognised, and I need not dwell further
upon it. The general conclusion, then, to which I come is, that
political economy must for the future be looked upon as an aggregate
of sciences. A hundred years ago, it was very wise of A. Smith to
attempt no sub-division, but to expound his mathematical theory
(for I hold that his reasoning was really mathematical in nature) in
conjunction with concrete applications and historical illustrations.
He produced a work so varied in interest, so beauti&l in style, and
so full of instruction, that it attracted many readers, and convinced
those that it attracted. But economists are no more bound to go on
imitating Adam Smith ip. the accidental features of his work, than
metaphysicians arc bound to write in the form of platonic dialogues,
or poets in the style of the Shakesperean drama. With the progress of
industry, how many hundreds or even thousands of trades have sprung
up since Smith wrote ! With the progress of knowledge, how many
sciences have been created, and sub-divided, again and again ! The
science of electricity has been almost entirely discovered since 1776,
yet now it has its abstract mathematical theories, its 'concrete appli-
cations, and its many branches, treating of frictional or static
electricity, dynamic electricity or galvanism, electro-chemistry,
electro-magnetism, magnetism, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric
electricity, and so forth. Within the same century chemistry, if not
born, has grown, and is now so vast a body of facts and laws that
professors are appointed to teach different parts of it. Yet the
political economist is expected to teach all parts of his equally
extensive and growing science, and is lucky if ho escape having to
profess also the mental, metaphysical, and moral sciences generally.

Nor can I doubt that in the future new developments of the
science of economy must take place. Whether it be a science or not^
or one science or many sciences, there is certainly an immense work
to be done by this or some closely related branches of knowledge.
If necessity is the mother of invention, as people are so fond of
saying, then many new sciences ought soon to be invented. When
listening to the speeches at the centenary dinner, I was much
struck with the contracted view which seemed to be entertained of
the work remaining to be accomplished by economists. Mr. Glad-
stone spoke as follows : —

‘‘ I am bound to say that this society has still got its work before it. ... I do
not mean to say that there is a great deal remaining to be .done here in the way
of direct legislation, yet there is something. It appears to me at least, that
perhaps the question of the currency is one in which we are still, I think, in a
backward condition ; our legislation having been confined in the main to avert-
ing great evils rather than to establishing a system which, besides being sound,
would be complete and logical. With that exceptioii perhaps, not much
remains in the province of d^t legislation.”

VOL. XX. N.S. U U . .

628

iHB FUTUBE OF POLTCIOAL EOONOHT.

Mr. Lowe also, as diown in a quotation from Hs Bpeech already
.giveui took a similarly desponding yiew of the powers and province
of economy. To my mind^ however^ our whole social system seems
to bristle with questions which will have to be decided one way or
the other, and to a great extent upon economical grounds. Whether
I look at the homes of the mass of the people, at workhouses, or
hospitals, whether I consider the gambling of the Stock Exchange,
the perplexity of bankers, anxious at one time to get money, at
another to get rid of it, the endless discussions of workmen and
masters, the diversion of the lands of the country from their proper
uses, the scandalous waste of endowments, I cannot help feeling that
the work before economists is more than ample.

I cannot better illustrate the need of more accurate economic
knowledge in some directions, than by adverting to one of the
principal points in debate at the centenary dinner. Mr. Newmarch,
the treasurer of the club, threw in an apple of discord when he
expressed a hope that political economy would lead to a restriction of
the sphere of government. He said : —

“ On one of the points mentioned by Mr. Lowe, with respect to political
economy in its relation to the future, I am sanguine enough to think that
there be what may be called a large negative development of political
•economy, tending to produce an important and beneficial effect; and that is,
such a development of political economy as will reduce the functions of govern-
ment within a smaller and smaller compass. The full development of the prin-
ciples of Adam Smith has been in no small danger for some time past; and one
«of the groat dangers which now hangs over this country, is that the wholesome
spontaneous operation of human interests and human desires, seems to be in
course of rapid supersession by the erection of one government department after
-another, by the setting up of one set of inspectors after another, and by the
whole time of parliament being taken up in attempting to do for the nation
those very things which, if the teaching of the man whose name we are cele-
brating to-day, is to boar any fruit at aU, the nation can do much better for
itself.”

Now it would not create much surprise if, on a point like this,
professional economists should differ, like doctors. Accordingly my
predecessor, Mr. Courtney, the honorary secretary of the club, took
occasion to protest against the doctrines of the honorary treasurer
being considered as those accepted by the club, at least as regards
legislation upon land tenure. But it was very interesting to find
that the practical statesmen were quite as much divided as the
economists upon this point. While some supported Mr. Newmarch,
one whom I can never help admiring for his firm consistency, and
the inestimable benefits which he has conferred upon this country in
the passing of the Education Act, namely Mr. W. E. Forster, took
the exactly opposite view.

** rWa strongly of the contrary opinion,” he said, “ that we cannot undertake
the Uniicz-faire principle in the present condition of our politics or of parties in

THE FIJTUBE OF FOLmOAL EOOKOHT.

629

parUament, or in the general condition of the country. I gather from Hr.
Newmarch’s remarks that he is an advocate of the old hxUsez-faire principle.
Well, if we were all Mr. Nowmarches, if we had nothing to deal with in the
country but men like ourselyos, we might do this. But we have to deal with
weak people ; we have to deal with people who have themselves to deal with
strong poople, who are borne down, who are tempted, who are unfortunate in
their circumstances of life, and who will say to us, and say to us with great
truth : What is your use as a parliament if you cannot help us in our weak-
ness, and against those who are too strong for us P ’*

Kow it is impossible to doubt that the lamez-faire principle pro-
perly applied is the wholesome and true one. It is that advocated
by Adam Smith, and it is in obedience to this principle that our
tariff has been reduced to the simplest possible form, that the naviga-
tion laws have been repealed, that masters and labourers have been
left free to make their own bargains about wages, and that a hundred
other ingenious pieces of legislation have been struck out of the
Statute Book. But does it follow that because we repeal old pieces
of legislation we shall need no new ones P On the contrary, as it
seems to me, while population grows more numerous and dense,
while^ industry becomes more complex and interdependent, as we
travel faster and make use of more intense forces, we shall neces-
sarily need more legislative supervision. It has been well said, I
think by Professor Hodgson, that the labourer need only ask of the
statesman what Diogenes asked of Alexander, that he should stand
out of his light. How, it was quite proper and reasonable that
Alexander should not obstruct the light of Diogenes ; but what if
other people should come and stand in Diogenes’ light, or, overlooking
anachronisms, street musicians should disturb his sleep and render
study impossible, or, finally, carrying companies should carelessly
convey gunpowder close behind his tub and blow it to bits ; would
Alexander have been justified in standing calmly by and quoting
lamez-faire doctrines like those of the French economists and Adam
Smith P I think not, and I believe that it will be found impossible
to dispense with more and more minute legislation.

The numerous elaborate bills which each government of England
has in late years attempted to pass, but generally without success,
is the best indication of the needs felt. But I quite agree with
Mr. Newmarch and Mr. Lowe that we should not proceed in this
path of legislative interference without most careful consideration
from a theoretical, as well as a practical, point of view, of what wo
are doing. If such a thing is possible, we need a new branch of
political and statistical science which shall carefully investigate the
limits to the lamez-faire principle, and show where we want greater
freedom and where less. It seems inconsistent that we should be
preaching freedom of industry and commerce at the same time that
we are hampering them with all kinds of minute regulations. But

u u 2

680

XHB FUTUBB OF FOIITIGAL BOONOHT.

there may be no real inconsistency if we can show the existence of
special reasons which oyerride the general principle in particular
cases. I am quite conyinced^ for instance, that the great mass of the
people will not haye healthy houses by the ordinary action of self-
interest. The only chance of securing good sanit£^ arrangements
is to pull down the houses which are hopelessly bad, as proyided by
an Act of the present ministry, and most carefully to superintend
under legislatiyo regulations all new houses that are built.

I will go a step farther, and assert that the utmost benefits may
be, and, in fact, are secured to us by extensions of goyemment action
of a kind quite unsanctioned by the laissez-faire principle. I allude
to the proyision of public institutions of yarious sorts — ^libraries,
museums, parks, free bridges.

Community of property is most wasteful in some cases, as in the
old commons, or unpreseryed oyster beds ; but these are cases of the
community of production. Community of consumption, on the con-
trary, is often most economical. The same book in a public library
may serye a hundred or fiye hundred readers as well as one. The
principle may be illustrated by the case of watches and clocks. On
reasonable suppositions I haye calculated that a priyate watch costs
people on the ayerage about one-fifteenth part of a penny for each
look at the time of day ; but a great public clock is none the worse,
howeyer many people may look at it. As a general rule, I should
say that the ayerage cost of public clocks is not more than one-one
hundred and fiftieth of a penny for each look, securing an economy
of ten times. The same principle may, howeyer, be called into
operation in a multitude of cases, most notably, howeyer, as regards
the weather. A well-appointed meteorological office with a system
of weather forecasts will be a necessary part of eyery goyemment,
and will secure the utmost adyantages to the community at a trifling
cost. I see no reason, again, why'^our streets and ro^s should, as
a general rule, be fit only for passing along and getting out of as
quickly as you can. With a trifling expenditure they might often
be conyerted into agreeable promenades, planted with trees, and
furnished with seats at the public cost. Our idea of happiness in
this country at presenir seems to consist in buying a piece of land if
possible, and building a high wall reWd it. If a man can only
secure, for instance, a beautiful yiew from his own garden and
windows, he cares not how many thousands of other persons he cuts
o£E from the daily enjoyment of that yiew. The rights of priyate
pTOpisrty and priyate action are pushed so far that the general
iniereste of the public are made of no account whateyer.

But the nicest discrimination will be required to show what the
goyenuaent should do, and what it should leaye to indiyiduals to do.
1 do not in the least* underestimate the wastefulness of goyemment

THE FUTUBE OF FOLIIIOAL ECONOUT.

631 *

departments, but I believe that this wastefolness may be far more
than counterbalanced in some cases by the economy of public pro-
perty.

I have said enough I think to suggest that there are still great
possibilities for us in the future. It will not do in a few sweeping
words to re-assert an old dictum of the last century, and to condemn
some of the greatest improvements of the time because they will not
agree with it. Listead of one dictum, lamez/aire, lamez passer, we
must have at least one science, one new branch of the old political
economy. Were time available I might go on to show that this is
by no means the only new branch of the science needed. We need,
for instance, a science of the money market, and of commercial
fluctuations, which shall inquire why the world is all activity for a
few years, and then all inactivity ; why, in short, there are such tides
in the affairs of men. But I am quite satisfied if I have pointed out
the need and the probable rise of one new branch, which is only to
be found briefly and imperfectly represented in the works of Mill
or other economists.

The future of political economy is not likely to be such a blank as
some of the speakers at the centennial dinner would lead us to
suppose. I hope that the Political Economy Club may exist long
enough to hold their second centennial celebration of the “ Wealth of
Nations,” and that then the disrupted fragments into which political
economy seems now to be falling will have proved themselves the
seeds of a new growth of beneficent sciences.

W. Stanley Jevons.

ON POPULAE CULTURE: AN ADDRESS.^

The proceedings which have now been brought satisfactorily to an
end, are of a k^d which nobody who has sensibility as well as sense
can take a port in without some emotion. An illustrious French
philosopher who happened to he on examiner of candidates for admis-
sion to the Polytechnic School, once confessed that, when a youth
camo before him eager to do his best, competently taught, and of an
apt intelligence, he needed all his self-control to press back the tears
from bis eyes. Well, when we think how much industry, patience,
and intelligent discipline ; how many hard hours of self-denying toil ;
how many temptations to worthless pleasures resisted; how much
steadfast feeling for things that are honest and true and of good report
— are all represented by the young men and young women to whom
I have had the honour of giving your prizes to night, we must all
feel our hearts warmed and gladdened in generous sympathy with so
much excellence, so many good hopes, and so honourable a display
of those qualities would make life better worth having for ourselves,
and are so likely to make the world better worth living in for those
who are to come after us.

If a prize-giving is always on occasion of lively satisfaction, my
own satisfaction is all the greater at this moment, because your
Institute, which is doing such good work in the world, and is in
every respect so prosperous and so flourishing, is the creation of the
people of your own district, without subsidy and without direction
either from London, or from Oxford, or from Cambridge, or from
any other centre whatever. Nobody in this town at any rate needs
any argument of mine to persuade him that wo can only be sure of
advancing all kinds of knowledge, and developing our national life
in all its plenitude and variety, on condition of multiplying these
local centres both of secondary and higher education, and encourag-
ing each of them to fight its own battle and do its work in its own
way. For my own part I look with the utmost dismay at the con-
centration, not only of population, but of the treasures of instruction,
in our vast city on the banks of the Thames. At Birmingham, as I
am informed, one has not &r to look for an example of this. One
of the branches of your multifarious trades in this town is the manu-
&otare of jewellery. Some of it is said commonly to be wanting in
taste, elegance, skill ; though some of it also— if I am not misin-
fonned-7-iB good enough to be passed off at Rome and at Paris, even

(1) Ab itumgiml addxeea ddiTsred at the Town Hall, Bimingham, October 6, 1876,
in opening the teerioB of the Midland Institute, by,Mr. Morler, as president for the year.

ON FOPULAB CULTUBE : AN ADDBSSS.

633 .

to connoisseurs, as of Boman or French production. Kow, the nation
possesses a most superb collection of all that is excellent and beautiful
in jewellers* work. When I say that the nation possesses it, I mean
that London possesses it. The University of Oxford, by the way, has
also purchased a portion, but that is not at present accessible. If
one of your craftsmen in that kind wants to profit by these admir-
able models, he must go to London. What happens is that he goes
to the capital and stays there. Its superficial attractions are too
strong for him. You lose a clever workman and a citizen, and he
adds one more atom to that huge, overgrown, and unwieldy com-
munity. Now, why, in the name of common sense, should not a
portion of the CasteUani collection pass six months of the year in
Birmingham, the very place of aU others where it is most likely to
be of real service, and to make an effective mark on the national
taste

To pass on to the more general remarks which you are accus-
tomed to expect from the President of the Institute on this occasion.
When I consulted one of your townsmen as to the subject which ho
thought would be most useful and most interesting to you, he said :
** Pray talk about anything you please, if it is only not Education.**
There is a saying that there are two kinds of foolish people in the
world, those who give advice, and those who do not take it. My
friend and I in this matter represent theso two interesting divisions of
the race, for in spite of what he said, it is upon Education after all
that I propose to offer you some short observations. You will believe
it no affectation on my part when I say that I shall do so with
the sincerest willingness to be corrected by those of wider practical

(1) Sir Henry Cole, C.B., writes to the Time% (Oct. 13) on this suggestion as follows
** In justice to the Lords President of the Council on Education, 1 hope you will allow
me the opportunity of stating that from 1856 the Science and Art Department has done
its very utmost to induce schools of art to receivo deposits of works of art for study and
popular examination, and to circulate its choicest objects useful to manufacturing
industry. In corroboration of this assertion, please to turn to p. 435 of the twenty-
second Bepoxt of the Deportment, just issued. You will there find that upwards of
26,907 objects of art, besides 23,911 paintings and drawings, have been circulated since
1855, and in some cases have been left for several months for exhibition in the localities.
They have been seen by more than 6,000,000 of visitors, besides having been copied by
students, &c., and the localities have taken the great sum of i!116,182 for low-
ing them.

The Department besides has tried every efficient means to induce other public
institutions, which are absolutely choked with superfluous specimens, to concur in a
general principle of circulating the nation's works of art, but without success.

The chief of our national storehouses of works of art actually repudiates the idea
that its objects are collected for purposes of education, and declares that they are only
* things rare and curious,* the very reverse of what common sense says they are.

Further, the Department, to tempt Schools of Art to acquire objects permanently for
art museums attached to them, offered a grant in aid of 50 per cent, of the cost price of
the objects.”

634

ON FOFULAB CULTUBE : AN ADDBESS.

experience in teacUng. I am well aware^ too^ that I have very little
that is new to say, but education is one of those matters on which
much that has already been said will long bear saying over and over
again.

I have been looking through the Eeport of your classes, and two
things have rather struck me, which I will mention. One of them
is the very large attendance in the French classes. This appears a
singularly satisfactory thing, because you could scarcely do a hard-
working man of whatever class a greater service than to give him
easy access to French literature. Montesquieu used to say that he
had never known a pain or distress which he could not soothe by
half an hour of a good book ; and perhaps it is no more of an exaggera-
tion to say that a man who can read French with comfort need never
have a dull hour. Our own literature has assuredly many a kingly
name. In boundless richness and infinite imaginative variety, there
is no rival to Shakespeare in the world ; in energy and height and
majesty Milton and Burke have no masters. But besides its great
men of this loftier sort, France has a long list of authors who have
produced a literature whose chief mark is its agreeablencss. As has
been so often said, the genius of the French language is its clearness,
firmness, and order : to this clearness certain circumstances in the
history of French society have added the delightful qualities of liveli-
ness in union with urbanity. Now as one of the most important
parts of popular education is to put people in the way of amusing
and refreshing themselves in a rational rather than an irrational
manner, it is a great gain to have given them the key to the most
amusing and refreshing set of books in the world.

And here, perhaps, I may be permitted to remark that it seems a pity
that Eacine is so constantly used as a schoolbook, instead of some of
the moderns who are nearer to ourselves in ideas and manners. Eacine
is a great and admirable writer, but what you want for ordinary
readers who have not much time and whose faculties of attention are
already largely exhausted by the more important industry of the
day, is a book which brings literature more close to actual life than
such a poet as Eacine does. This is exactly one of the gifts and
charms of modem French. To put what I mean very shortly, I
would say by way of illustration that a man who could read the
essays of Ste. Beuve with moderate comfort would have in his hands
—of course I am now speaking of the active and busy part of the
world, not of bookmen and students — ^would, I say, have in his
hands one of the very best instruments that I can think of ; such
work is exquisite and instructive in itself, it is a model of gracious
writing, it is full of ideas, it breathes the happiest moods over us, and
it is tha most suggestive of guides, for those who have the capacity
of extensive interests, to all the greater spheres of thought and
history.

ON POPULAB CULTUBE : AN ADDBESS. 635

This word brings me back to the second fact that bas struck me in
your Beport^ and it is this. The subject of English history has
apparently so little popularity, that the class is as near being a
failure as anything connected with the Midland Institute can be.
On the whole, whatever may be the ability and the zeal of the
teacher, this is in my humble judgment neither very surprising
nor particularly mortifying, if we think what history in the esta-
blished conception of it means. How are we to expect workmen to
make their way through constitutional antiquities, through the laby-
rinthine shifts of party intrigue at home, and through the entangle-
ments of intricate diplomacy abroad — shallow village tales ** as
Emerson calls them? These studies are fit enough for professed
students of the special subject, but such exploration is for the
ordinary run of men and women impossible, and I do not know that
it would lead them into very fruitful lands even if it were easy.
You know what the great Duke of Marlborough said : that he had
learnt all the history he ever knew out of Shakespeare’s historical
plays. I have long thought that if we persuaded those classes who
have to fight their own little Battles of Blenheim for bread every day,
to make such a beginning of history as is furnished by Shakespeare’s
plays and Scott’s novels, we should have done more to imbue them
with a real interest in the past of mankind, than if we had taken them
through a course of Hume and Smollett, or Hallam on the English
Constitution, or even the dazzling Macaulay. What I for one
would like to see in such an institution as this would be an attempt
to compress the whole history of England into a dozen or fifteen
lectures — ^lectures of course accompanied by catechetical instruction.
I am not so extravagant as to dream that a short general course of this
kind would be enough to go over so many of the details as it is
desirable for men to know, but details in popular instruction, though
not in the study of the writer or the xmiversity professor, are only
important after you have imparted the largest general truths. It is
the general truths that stir a life-like curiosity as to the particulars
which they are the means of lighting up. Now this short
course would be quite enough to present in a bold outline-*
and it need not be a whit the less true and real for being both
bold and rapid — the great chains of events and the decisive move-
ments, that have made of ourselves and our institutions what we
and what they are — the Teutonic beginnings, the Conquest, the
Cfreat Charter, the Hundred Years’ War, the Reformation, the
Civil Wars and the Revolution, the Emancipation of the American
Colonies from the Monarchy. If this course were fjramed and filled
in with a true social intelligence, men would find that they had at
the end of it a fair idea — ^an idea that might be of great value, and
at any rate an idea much to be preferred to that blank ignorance

686

ON POFULAB GULTUBE : AN AODBESS.

whidi is in BO many cases practically the only alternative— of the
large isenies of our past, of the antagonistic principles that strove with
one another for mastery, of the chief material forces and moral
currents of successive ages, and above all of those great men and our
fathers that begat us — ^the Pyms, the Hampdens, the Cromwells, the
Ghathams — ^yes, and shall we not say the Washingtons — ^to whose
sagacity, bravery, and unquenchable ardour for justice and order and
equal laws all our English-speaking peoples owe a debt that can never
be paid.

Another point is worth thinking of, besides the reduction of
history for your purposes to a comprehensive body of rightly grouped
generalities. Dr. Arnold says somewhere that he wishes the public
might have a history of our present state of society traced backwards.
It is the present that really interests us ; it is the present that we
seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the least want to
know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my
way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to know
what men thought and did in the thirteenth century, not out of any
dilettante or idle antiquarian’s curiosity, but because the thirteenth cen-
tury is at the root of what men think and do in the nineteenth. Well
then, it cannot be a bad educational rule to start from what is most
interesting, and to work from that outwards and backwards. By be-
ginning with the present we see more clearly what are the two things
best worth attending to in history — not party intrigues nor battles
nor dynastic a&irs, nor even many acts of parliament, but the great
movements of the economic forces of a society on the one hand, and
on the other the forms of religious opinion and ecclesiastical organi-
zation. All the rest are important, but their importance is sub-
sidiary.

Allow me to make one more remark on this subject. If a dozen or a
score of wise lectures would suffice for a general picture of the various
phases through which our own society has passed, there 'bught to be
added to the course of popular instruction as many lectures more, which
should trace the history, not of England, but of the world. And the
history of the world ought to go before the history of England. This
is no paradox, but the deliberate opinion of many of those who have
thought most deeply about the far-reaching chain of human progress.
When I was on a visit to the United States some years ago, — ^things
may have improved since then — ^I could not help noticing that the
history classes in their common schools all began their work with
the year 1776, when the American colonies formed themselves into
an independent confederacy. The teaching assumed that the crea-
tion of the universe occurred about that date. What could be more
absutd, more narrow and narrowing, more mischievously misleading
as to the whole purport and significance of history. As if the laws,

ON POPULAB COLTUBE : AN APDBESS. ,

637

tlio Tepresentatiye institutions^ the religious uses, the scientific
methods, the moral ideas, which give to an American citizen his
character and mental habits and social surroundings had not all their
roots in the deeds and thoughts of wise and brave men, who lived in
centuries which are of course just as much the inheritance of the
vast continent of the West, as they arc of the little island from
whence its first colonisers sailed forth.

Well, there is something nearly as absurd, if not quite, in our
common plan of taking for granted that people should begin their
reading of history, not in 1776, but in 1066. As if this could
‘ bring into our minds what is after all the greatest lesson of history,
namely, the fact of its oneness ; of the interdependence of all the
elements that have in the course of long ages made the European of
to-day what wo see him to be. It is no doubt necessary for clear
and definite comprehension to isolate your phenomenon, and to
follow the stream of our own history separately. But that cannot
be enough. We must also see that this stream is the effluent of a far
broader and mightier flood — ^whose springs and sources and great
tributaries lay higher up in the history of mankind.

“We are learning,” says Mr. Freeman, whoso little book on the
Uiiify of Histoh^j I cannot be wrong in warmly recommending even
to the busiest among you, “ that European history, from its first
glimmerings to our own day, is one unbroken drama, no part of
which can bo rightly understood without reference to the other parts
which come before and after it. We are learning that of this great
drama Borne is the centre, the point to which all roads lead and
from which all roads lead no less. The world of independent Ghreece
stands on one side of it ; the world of modem Europe stands on
another. But the history alike of the great centre itself, and of its
satellites on either side, can never be fullj grasped except from a
point of view wide enough to take in the whole group, and to
mark the relations of each of its members to the centre and to one
another.”

Now the counsel which our learned historian thus urges upon the
scholar and the leisured student, equally represents the point of
view which is proper for the more numerous classes of whom we are
t hinkin g to-night. The scale will have to be reduced ; all save the
very broadest aspects of things will have to bo left out ; none save
the highest ranges and streams of most copious volume will find a
place in that map. Small as is the scale and many as are its
omissions, yet if a man has intelligently followed the very shortest
coarse of universal history, it will be the fault of his teacher if he
has not acquired an impressive conception, which will never be
effaced, of the destinies of man upon the earth ; of the mighty con-
fluence of forces working on from age to age which have their

638

OX POPULAB CULTUBE : AX ADDBESS.

meeting in every one of us here to-night ; of the order in which
each state of society has followed its foregoer, according to great and
changeless laws ^ embracing all things and all times ’ ; 'of the thousand
faithful hands that have one after another, each in their several
degrees, orders, and capacities, trimmed the silver lamp of know-
ledge and kept its sacred flame bright from generation to generation
and age to age, now in one land and now in another, from its
early spark among far-off dim Chaldeans down to Goethe and
Faraday and Darwin, and all the other good workers of our own
day.

The shortest course of universal history will let him see how he
owes to the Greek civilisation, on the shores of the Mediterranean
two thousand years back, a debt extending from the architeetural
forms of this very Town Hall to some of the most systematic opera-
tions of his own mind ; will let him see the forum of Home, its
roads and its gates —

** What conflux issuing forth or entering in,

PrsetoTB, Proconsuls to their provinces
Hasting or on return, in robes of state —

all busily welding an empire together in a marvellous framework of
citizenship, manners, and laws, that laid assured foundations for a
still higher eivilisation that was to eome after. He will learn how
when the Boman Empire declined, then at Damascus and Bagdad and
Seville the Mahometan conquerors took up the torch of science and
learning, and handed it on to western Europe when the new genera-
tions were ready. He will learn how in the meantime, during ages
which we both wrongly and ungratefully call dark, from Borne again,
that other great organization, the mediaeval Church, had arisen,
which amid many imperfections and some crimes did a work that no
glory of physical science can equal, and no instrument of physical
science can compass, in purifying man’s appetites, in setting dis-
cipline and direction on their lives, and in offering to humanity new
types of moral obligation and fairer ideals of saintly perfection whose
light stUl shines like a star to guide our own poor voyages. It is
only by this contemplation of the life of our race as a whole that
men see the beginnings and the ends of things ; learn not to be
nearsighted in history, but to look before and after ; see their own part
and lot in the rising up and going down of empires and faiths since
first recorded time began; and what I am contending for is that
even if you can take your young men and women no further than
the mere vestibule of this ancient and ever venerable Temple of
many marvels, you will have opened to them the way to a Idnd of
knowledge that not only enlightens the understanding, but enriches

OK FOPITLAlt CULTUBE : AK ABDBESS, 689

tlie cliaracier — ^whicli is a higHer thing than mere intellect — and
makes it constantly alive with the spirit of beneficence.

I know it is said that such a view of collective history is true,
but that you will never get plain people to respond to it ; it
is a thing for intellectual dilettanti and moralising virtuosi. Well,
we do not know, because we have never yet honestly tried,
what the commonest people will or will not respond to. When
Sir Eichard Wallace’s pictures were being exhibited at Bethnal
Green, after people had said that the workers had no souls for art
and would not appreciate its treasures, a story is told of a female in
very poor clothes gazing intently at a picture of the Infant Jesus in
the arms of his Mother, and then exclaiming, Who loould iiot try
to he a good xcoman^ xoho had such a child as that We have never
yet, I say, tried the height and pitch to which our people are capable
of rising.

I have thought it well to take this opportunity of saying a
word for history, because I cannot help thinking that one of the
most narrow and what will eventually be one of the most im-
poverishing characteristics of our day is the excessive supremacy
claimed for physical science. This is partly due, no doubt, to a
most wholesome reaction against the excessive supremacy that has
hitherto been claimed for literature, and held by literature, in our
schools and universities. At the same time, it is well to remember
that the historic sciences are making strides not unworthy of being
compared with those of the physical sciences, and not only is there
room for both, but any system is radically wrong which excludes or
depresses either to the advantage of the other.^

> And now there is another idea which I should like to throw out,
if you will not think it too tedious and too special. It is an old
saying that, after all, the great end and aim of the British Constitu-
tion is to get twelve honest men into a box. That is really a very
sensible way of putting the theory, that the first end of government
is to give security to life and property, and to make people keep
their contracts. But with this view it is not only important that
you should get twelve honest men into a box : the twelve honest
men must have in their heads some notions as to what constitutes
Evidence. Now it is surely a striking thing that while we are so

(1) A very eminent physicist writes to me on this passage : — ** I cannot help smiling
when I think of the place of physiesd science in the endowed schools,” Ac. Hy
reference was to the great prevalence of such assertions as that human progress depends
upon increase of our knowledge of the oonditions of material jdienomena (Dr. Draper,
for instance, lays this down as a fimdamental axiom of history) ; as if moral advance, the
progressive elevation of types of character and ethical ideals, were not at least on
equally important cause of improvement in civilisation. The type of Saint Yincent de
Paul is plainly as indispensable to progress as the type of Kewton.

640

OK POPUIiAB CUITXTBE: AK ADDBBaSI.

careful to teaoli physical science and literature ; while men want to be
endowed in order to have leisure to explore our spinal cords and
observe the locomotor system of Medusse-— and I have no objection
against those who urge on all these studies — ^yet> there is no syste**
^tio teaching, very often no teaching at all> in the principles of
Evidence and Reasoning, even for the bulk of those who would be
very much (tended if we were to say that they are not educated. Qf
course I use the term evidence in a wider sense than the testimony
in crimes and contracts, and the other business of courts of law.
Questions of evidence are arising at every hour of the day.
As Bentham says, it is a question of evidence with the cook
whether the joint of meat is roasted enough. It has been excel-
lently said that the principal and most characteristic difference
between one human intellect and another consists in their ability
to judge correctly of evidence. Most of us, Mr. Mill says, are very
unsafe hands at estimating evidence, if appeal cannot be made
to actual eyesight. Indeed, if we think of some of the tales
that have been lately been diverting the British Association,
we might perhaps go further, and describe many of us as very bad
hands at estimating evidence even where appeal can be made to
actual eyesight. Eyesight, in fact, is the least part of the matter.
The senses are as often the tools as the guides of reason. One of
the longest chapters in the history of vulgar error would contain the
cases in which the eyes have only seen what old prepossessions
inspired them to sec, and were blind to all that would have been
fatal to the prepossessions, “It is beyond all question or dispute,”
says Voltaire, “ that magic words and ceremonies are quite capable
of most effectually destroying a whole flock of sheep, if the words bo
accompanied by a sufficient quantity of arsenic.” Sorcery has no
doubt been exploded — at least we assume that it has — ^but the temper
that made men attribute all the efficacy to the magic words, and
entirely overlook the arsenic, still prevails in a great Jiost of moral
and political affairs, into which it is not convenient to enter here.
The stability of a government for instance is constantly set down
to some ornamental part of it, when in fact the ornament has no
more to do with stability than the incantations of the soothsayer.

You have heard, again, that for many generations the people of
the Isle of St. Eilda believed that the arrival of a ship in the harbour
inflicted on the islanders epidemic colds in the head, and many
ingenious reasons were from time to time devised by clever men
why the ship should cause colds among the populatioh. At. last it
occurred to somebody that the ship might not be the cause of the
colds; but that both might be the common effects of some other
cajqpse, and it was then remembered that a ship could only enter the
harbour when there was a strong north-east wind blowing.

ON POPULAR CULTURE : AN ADDRESS.

841

However faithful the observation^ as soon as ever a mmi iiaea
words he may begin at that moment to go wrong. “A. village
apothecary/’ it has been said, *'and if possible in a still greater
degree, an experienced nurse, is seldom able to describe the plainest
case without employing a phraseology of which every word is a
theory; the simplest narrative of the most illiterate observer
involves more or less of hypothesis — ^yet both by the observer
himself and by most of those who listen to him, each of these con-
jectural assumptions is treated as respectfully as if it were an
established axiom. We are supposed to deny the possibility of a
circumstance, when in truth we only deny the evidence alleged for
it. We allow the excellence of reassuring from certain data to
captivate our belief in the truth of the data themselves, even when
they are improved and improveable. There is no end, in short, of
the ways in which men habitually go wrong in their reasoning,
tacit or expressed. The greatest boon that any benefactor could
confer on the human race would be to teach men — and especially
women — ^to quantify their propositions. It sometimes seems as if
Swift were right when he said that Mankind were just as fit for
flying as for thinking.

Now it is quite true that mother-wit and the common experiences
of life do often furnish people with a sort of shrewd and sound judg-
ment that carries them very creditably through the world. They
come to good conclusions, though perhaps they would give bad reasons
for them, if they were forced to find their reasons. ]3ut you cannot
count upon mother- wit in everybody; perhaps not even in a
majority. And then as for the experience of life, — ^there are a great
many questions, and those of the deepest ultimate importance to
mankind, in which the ordinary experience of life sheds no light,
until it has been interrogated and interpreted by men with trained
minds. It is far easier,’’ as has been said, to acquire facts
than to judge what they prove.” What is done in our systems of
training to teach people how to judge what facts prove ? There is
Mathematics, no doubt ; anybody who has done even no more than
the first book of Euclid’s geometry, ought to have got into his head
the notion of a demonstration, of the rigorously close connection '
between a conclusion and its premisses, of the necessity of being
able to show how each link in the chain comes to be where
it is, and that it has a right to be there. This, however, is a long
way from the facts of real life, and a man might well be a great
geometer and still be a thoroughly bad reasoner in practical questions.

Again, in other of your classes, in Chemistry, in Astronomy, in
Natural History, besides acquiring groups of facts the student has
a glimpse of the method by which they were discovered, of the type
of inference to which the discovery conforms, so that the discovery

ON mOLAN ooltube: an addbess.

642

of a new cornet^ the detection of a new speoiesi the invention of a
new chemical compound^ each becomes a lesson of the most beautiM
and impressive kind in the art of reasoning. And it would be
superfluous and impertinent for me here to point out how valuable
such lessons are in the way of mental discipline, apart from the fruit
they bear in other ways. But here again the relation to the judg-
ments we have to form in the moral, political, practical sphere i^ too •
remote and too indirect. The judgments in this region, of the most
brilliant and successful explorers in physical science seem to be
exactly as liable to every kind of fallacy as those of other people.
The application of scientific method and conception to society is yetv»
in its i^ancy, and the Novum Orgamm or the Principia of moral and
social phenomena will perhaps not be wholly disclosed to any of us
now alive. In any case it is clear that for the purposes of such an
institution as this, if the rules of evidence and proof and all the other
safeguards for making your propositions true and relevant — ^are
to be taught at all, they must be taught not only in an elementary
form, but with illustrations that shall convey their own direct
reference and application to practical life. If everybody could find
time to master MilVs LogiCy or so instructive and interesting a book
as Professor Jevons’s Principles of Scienccy a certain number at any
rate of the bad mental habits of people would be cured ; and for
those of you here who have leisure enough, and want to find a
worthy keystone of your culture, it would be hard to find a better
thing to do for the next six months than to work through one or
both of the books I have just named — ^pen in hand. The ordinary
text-books of formal logic do not seem to meet the special aim which
I am now trying to impress as desirable — ^namely the habit of
valuing, not merely speculative nor scientific truth, but the truth of
practical life ; a practising of the intellectual conscience in forming
and expressing the opmions and judgments that form the staple
of our daily discourse.

It is now accepted that the most effective way of learning a
foreign language is to begin by reading books written in it, or by
conversing in it — and then after a certain empirical familiarity
with vocabulary and construction has been acquired, one may
proceed to master the grammar. Just in the same way it would
seem to be the best plan to approach the art of practical reasoning
in concrete examples, in cases of actual occurrence and living
interest ; and then after the processes of disentangling, a complex
group of propositions, of dividhig and sifting, of scenting a fallacy,
have all become famftiar, it may be worth whfh^ to find names for
them all, and to set out rules for reasoning rightly, just as in the
former illustration the rules of wnting 'correctly follow a certain
pnu4ioe, rather than precede it.

ON POPULAE CULTUEE ; AW ADDEESS.

643

Now it has long seemed to me that the best way of teaching care-
fulness and precision in dealing with propositions might be found
through the medium of the argumentation in the courts of
justice. This is reasoning in real matter. There is a famous book
well known to legal students — Smith’s Leading Cases — ^which con-
tains a selection of important decisions, and sets forth the grounds
on which the courts arrived at them. I have often thought that a
dozen or a score of cases might be collected from this book into a
small volume, that would make such a manual as no other matter
could, for opening plain men’s eyes to the logical pitfalls among
which they go stumbling and crashing when they think they
are disputing like Socrales or reasoning like Newton. They
would see how a proposition or an expression that looks straight-
forward and immistakable, is yet on examination found to be
capable of bearing several distinct interpretations and meaning
several distinct things ; how the same evidence may warrant
different conclusions, and what kinds of evidence carry with them
what degrees of validity : how certain sorts of facts can only be
proved in one way, and certain other sorts of facts in some other
way : how necessary it is before you set out to know exactly what it
is you intend to show, or what it is you intend to dispute : how
there may be many argumentative objections to a proposition,
yet the balance be in favour of its adoption. It is from
the generality of people having neglected to practise the atten-
tion on those and the like matters, that interest and prejudice
find so ready an instrument of sophistry in that very art of speech
which ought to be the organ of reason and truth. To bring the
matter to a point, then, I submit that it might be worth while in
this and all such institutions to have a class for the study of Logic,
Reasoning, Evidence, and that such a class might well find its best
material in selections from Leading Cases, and from Bentham’s
Hationale of Judicial Evidence, elucidated by those special sections in
Mill’s Logic, or smaller manuals such as those of Mr. Fowler, the
Oxford Professor of Logic, which treat of the department of Fallacies.
Perhaps Bentham’s Book of Fallacm is too political for me to
commend it to you here. But if there happens to be any one in
Birmingham who is fond of meeting proposed changes by saying
that they are Utopian ; that they are good in theory, but bad in
practice ; that they are too good to be realised,^ and so forth, then
I can promise him that he will in that book hear of something very
much to his advantage.^

l This Buggostion has fortnnatoly found favour in a quarter where shrewd and
critical common sense is never wanting. The Bconumiii (Oot. 14) writes: — ^*Such a
text hooVoommented on to a edass by a man trained to esthnate the value of eyidenoe,
would form a most valuable study, and not, we should imagine, at aU less f sBc in at ing
YOL. XX. N.8. X X

644

ON POPULAB gultube: an abdbess.

An incidental advantage— whidi is worth mentioning — of
making legal instances the medium of instruction in practical
logiCj would be that people would — not learn law, of course,
in the present state of our system, but they would have their
attention called in a direct and business-like way to the lawyer’s
point of view, and those features of procedure in which every man
and woman in the land has so immediate an interest. Perhaps if
people interested themselves more seriously than is implied by read-
ing famous cases in the newspapers, we should get rid, for one
thing, of the rule which makes the accused person in a criminal case
incompetent to testify ; and, for another, of that infamous licence of
cross-examination to credit, which is not only barbarous to those who
have to submit to it, but leads to constant miscarriage of justice in
the case of those who rather than submit to it will suffer wrong.

It will be said, I daresay, that overmuch scruple about our proposi-
tions and the evidence for them will reduce men, especially the
young, to the intellectual condition of the great philosopher, Mar-
phurius, in Molierc’s comedy. Marphurius rebukes Sganerello
for saying he had come into the room; — ‘‘What you should
say is, that it seems I am come into the room.” Instead of the
downright affirmations and burly negations so becoming to Britons,
he would bring down all our propositions to the attenuation of a
possibility or a perhaps. We need not fear such an end. The
exigencies of practical affairs will not allow this endless balancing.
They are always driving men to the other extreme, making us
like the new judge, who first heard the counsel on one side and
made up his mind on the merits of the case, until the turn of the
opposing counsel came, and then the new counsel filled the judge
with so many doubts and perplexities, that he suddenly vowed that
nothing would induce him to pay any heed to evidence again as
long as he lived.

I do not doubt that I shall be blamed in what !Phave said
about French, and about history, for encouraging a spirit of super-
ficiality, and of contentment with worthless smatterings of things.
To this I should answer that, as Archbishop Whately pointed out
long ago, it is a fallacy to mistake general truths for superficial
truths, or a knowledge of the leading propositions of a subject for
a superficial knowledge. “To have a general knowledge of a
subject is to know only its leading truths, but to know these
thoroughly, so as to have a true conception of the subject in its
great features.” {Mill,) And I need not point out that instruction

than valosble. Of courso the dbiss suggested would not be a class in Eoglisb law, but
in thsprineiples on which oyidenco should be estimated, and the q>ecial enon to wUch,
in OQlliiilQn life, average minds are most liable. , We regard this suggestion as a most
us^jEbl one, and as one which would not only greatly contribute to the educational worth '
instifeitte fnr adults, but also to its popularity.'* ^

ON POPULAB CnTLTUBE : AN APPBESS. 645

may be of the most general kind, and still possess that most
important quality of all instruction — ^namely, being methodical.

I think popular instruction has been made milch more repulsive
than it need have been, and more repulsive than it ought to have
been, because thoso who have had the control of the movement for
the last fifty years have been too anxious to make the type of
popular instruction conform to the type of academic instruction
proper to learned men. The principles of instruction have been too
rigorously ascetic and puritanical, and instead of making the access
to knowledge as easy as possible, we have delighted in forcing every
pilgrim to make his journey to the shrine of the Muses with a hair-
shirt on his back and peas in his shoes. IN'obody would say that
Macaulay had a superficial knowledge of the things best worth know-
ing in ancient literature, yet we have his own confession that when
he became a busy man — as you are all busy — ^then he read his
classics not like a collegian but like a man of the world ; if he did
not know a word, ho passed it over, and if a passage refused to give
up its meaning at the second reading, then he let it alone. Now the
aims of academic education and those of popular education are —
it is obvious if you come to think of it — quite dijSerent. The
end of the one is rather to increase knowledge : of the other
to diffuse it, and to increase men’s interest in what is already
known. If, therefore, I am for making certain kinds of instruction
as general as they can possibly be made in these local centres, I
should give to the old seats of learning a very special function
indeed. I should like to occupy your attention for a very few
minutes by one or two remarks on this question. You are aware
that a Bill was brought before parliament by a distinguished member
of the government last session, and will be introduced again next
session, dealing with the two famous universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. Shortly speaking, the object of this measure is to sup-'
press a certain number of college fellowships — which Lord Salisbury,
rather unpleasantly for their occupants, called * idle fellowships ’ —
and to transfer the funds to the support of professorial chairs, the
erection of buildings, and other purposes connected not with the
colleges as such, but with the university. I remember some two
years ago that one of your most zealous townsmen one day threw
a bombshell among a party of university men, by crying that
Oxford would never do any good in the world until it was removed
to Birmingham. Well, when I think.of the old grey quadrangles,
the tranquil gardens, the dreaming spires, the clear air, the long
intellectual tradition of old Oxford, I confess I am not at once
converted to our friend’s heroic doctrine. But in common with
every other son of Oxford, who thinks much about it, I cannot

X X 2

646

ON POPULAE cultubb: an addeess.

help seeing that the university is not doing the work in the world
which it might well be made to do. The residents — ^though working
very diligently in their educational calling — are restless and unhappy.
The young men who arc content to take the ordinary degree are for
the most part the sort of people who ought never to pretend, to go
to a university at all. And lastly the young men who work hardest
and take high degrees, and then get their fellowships — I speak of
Oxford, not of Cambridge, of which I know less — seem to me os
unsatisfactory as the rest of the University. Here is the account
of them by one who is himself an Oxford fellow, and a very distin-
guished one : —

“Too often, the undergraduate, after receiving a smattering of
philosophical theories past and present, with a neatly labelled cata-
logue of arguments jw'o and caw, becomes an intolerable prig, wi^h a
supreme contempt for facts or scientific enthusiasm, and on equal
belief in his power of criticising his teachers from Aristotle to Mill.
A first class gives the title to his claims, and allows him to pass
though life an amiable dilettantey who has discovered that all things
may be disposed of by half-a» dozen a jwv'ari quibbles, and that
scientific certainty is a dream.^’

It would be absurd to attempt to discuss academic organization
here, at this hour. I only want to ask you as politicians whose repre-
sentatives in parliament will ultimately settle the matter — ^to reflect
whether the money now consiuned in idle fellowships might not be
more profitably employed in endowing inquirers. The favourite
argument of those who support prize fellowships is that they are the
only means by which a child of the working class can raise himself
to the highest positions in the land. My answer to this would be
that, in the first place, it is of questionable expediency to invite tho
cleverest members of any class to leave it — ^instead of making their
abilities available in it, and so raising the whole class along with,
and by means of, their own rise. Second, these prize ^fellowships
wiU continue, and must continue, to be carried off by those who can
afford time and money to educate their sons for the competition.
Third, I doubt the expediency — ^and the history of Oxford within
the last twenty-five years strikingly confirms this doubt — of giving
to a young man of any class what is practically a premium on
indolence, and the removal of a motive to self-reliant and energetic
spirit of enterprise. The best thing that I can think of as happen-
ing to a young man is this : that he should have been educated at
a day-school in his own town ; that he should have opportunities of
following also the higher education in his own town ; and that at
the earliest convenient time he should be taught to earn his own
Hvjng. ^

tOie Universities might then be left to their proper business of

ON POPULAE CULTUEE : AN ABDEESS. 647

study. Knowledge for its own sake is clearly an object wbich only
a very small portion of society can be spared to pursue ; only a very
few men in a generation have tbat devouring passion for knowing,
which is the true inspirer of fruitful study and exploration. Even
if the passion were moro common than it is, the world could not
afford on any very large scale that men should indulge in it : the
great business of the world has to be carried on. One of the
greatest of all hindrances to making things better, is the habit of
taking for granted that plans or ideas, simply because they are
different and approach the matter from different sides, are therefore
the rivals and enemies, instead of being the friends and comple-
ments of one another. But a great and wealthy society like burs
ought very well to be able to nourish one or two great seats for the
augmentation of true learning, and at the same time make sure that
young men — and again I say, especially young women — should have
good education of the higher kind within reach of their own hearths.

It is not nccessar)'’ for mo here, I believe, to dwell upon any of
the great commonplaces which the follower of knowledge does well
to keep always before his eyes, and which represent the wisdom of
many generations of studious experience. You know as well as I
or any one can tell you, that knowledge is worth little or nothing
until you have made it so perfectly your own, as to bo capable of
reproducing it in precise and definite form. Nobody can he sure
that he has got clear ideas on a subject unless he has tried to put
them down on a piece of paper in independent words of his own. It
is an excellent plan, too, when you have read a good book, to sit
down and write a short abstract of what you can remember of it.
It is a still better plan, if you can make up your minds to a slight
extra labour, to do what Lord Strafford, and Gibbon, and Daniel
Webster did : after glancing over the title, subject, or design of a
book, these eminent men would take a pen and write roughly what
questions they expected to find answered in it, what difficulties
solved, what ]^d of information imparted. Such practices keep us
from reading with the eye only, gliding vaguely over the page ; and
they help us to place our new acquisitions in relation with what we
knew before. All this takes trouble, no doubt, but then it will not
do to deal with ideas that we find in books or elsewhere as a certain
bird does with its eggs — ^Icave them in the sand for the sun to
hatch and chance to rear. People who follow this plan possess
nothing better than ideas half-hatched, and convictions reared by
accident. They are like a man who should pace up and down the
world in the delusion that he is clad in sumptuous robes of purple
and velvet, when in truth he is only half-covered by the rags and
tatters of other people’s cast-off clothes.

648

ON* POPULAB GTTLTUBE : US^ ADDRESS.

Then, again, nobody here needs to be reminded that the great
Buccesses of the world have been afikirs of a second, a third, nay
a fiftieth trial. The history of literature, of science, of art, of
industrial achievements, all testifies to the truth that success is only
the last term of what looked like a series of failures. What is true
of the great achievements of history, is true also of the little achieve-
ments of the observant cultivator of his own understanding. If a
man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can pre-
scribe to him is to turn to a good biography ; there he will find
that other men before him have known the dreary reaction that
follows long-sustained effort, and he wiU find that one of the dif-
ferences between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the
vigour with which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction and
crushes it down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach.
I remember the wisest and most virtuous man I have ever known,
or am ever likely to know — ^Mr. Mill — onco saying to me that when-
ever he had written anything, he always felt profoundly dissatisfied
with it, and it was only by reflecting that he had felt the same
about other pieces of which the world had thought well, that he
could bring himself to send the now production to the printer. The
heroism of the scholar and the truth-seeker is not less admirable
than the heroism of the man-at-arms.

Finally, you none of you need to be reminded of the most central
and important of all the commonplaces of the student— that the stuff
of which life is made is Time ; that it is better, as Goethe said, to
do the most trifling thing in the world, than to think half an hour
a trifling thing. Nobody means by this that we are to have no
pleasures. Where time is lost and wasted is where many people lose
and waste their money — in things that are neither pleasure nor
business — ^in those random and officious sociabilities which neither
refresh nor instruct nor invigorate, but only fret and benumb and
wear all edge off the mind. All these things, however, yefU have all
of yoif often thought about ; yet, alas, we arc so ready to forget, both
in these matters and in other and weightier, how irrevocable are
the hours, how irrevocable our mistakes.

“ The moving Pinger writes, and haying writ,

Moves on ; nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it hack to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it.”

And now I think I cannot ask you to listen any longer. I will
only add that these ceremonial anniversaries, when they are over,
sometimes slightly tend to depress us, unless we are on our guard.
When the prizes of the year are all distributed, and the address is at
an end, we perhaps ask ourselves. Well, and what then P It is not
to be denied that the expectations of the first fervent promoters of

ON POPULAB CI7LTUBS : AN ABDBESS.

popular instruction by sucb Institutes as this— of men like Lord
Brougham and others, a generation ago — were not fulfilled. The
principal reason was that the elementary instruction of the country
was not then sufficiently adyanced to supply a population ready to
take advantage of education in the higher subjects. Well, we are in
a fair way for removing that obstacle. It is true that the old world
moves tardily on its arduous way, but even. if the results of all our
efforts in the cause of education were smaller than they are, there
are still two considerations that ought to weigh with us and en-
courage us.

For one thing, you never know what child in rags and pitiful
squalor that meets you in the street, may have in him the germ of
gifts that might add new treasures to the storehouse of beautiful
things or noble acts. In that great storm of terror which swept
over France in 1793, a certain man who was every hour expecting to
be led off to the guillotine, uttered this memorable sentiment. ^^£ven
at this incomprehensible moment” — ^he said — “when morality,
enlightenment, love of country, all of them only make death at the
prison-door or on the scaffold more certain — yes on the fatal tum-
bril itself with nothing free but my voice, I could still cry Take care
to a child that should come too near the wheel ; perhaps I may save
his life, perhaps he may one day save his country.” This is a
generous, an inspiring thought — one to which the roughest-handed
man or woman in Birmingham may respond as honestly and heartily,
as the philosopher who wrote it. It ought to shame the listlessncss
with which so many of us see the great phantasmagoria of life pass
before us.

There is another thought to encourage us, still more direct, and
still more positive. The boisterous old notion of hero-worship, which
has been preached by so eloquent a voice in our age, is after aU
now seen to be a half-truth, and to contain the less edifying and the
less profitable half of the truth. The world will never bo able to
spare its hero, and the man with the rare and inexplicable gift of
genius will always be as commanding a figure as he has ever been.
What we see every day with increasing clearness is that not only
the well-being of the many, but the chances of exceptional genius,
moral or intellectual, in the gifted few, are highest in a society whore
the average interest, curiosity, capacity, are all highest. The moral
of this for you and for me is plain. We cannot, like Beethoven or
Handel, lift the soul by the magic of divine melody into the seventh
heaven of ineffiible vision and hope incommensurable ; we cannot,
like Newton, weigh the far-off stars in a balance, and measure the
heavings of the eternal flood ; we cannot, like Voltaire, scorch up
what is cruel and false by a word as a flame, nor, like Milton or
Burke, awaken men’s hearts with Uie note of an organ-trumpet ; we

650

ON FOFULAB CULTUBE: AN AOOSESS.

oanno^ like the great saints of the churches and the great sages of
the schools, add to those acquisitions of spiritual beauty and intel*
lectual mastery which have, one by one, and little by little, raised
man from being no higher than the brute to be only a little lower
than the angels. But what we can do— the humblest of us in this
great hall— is by diligently using our own minds and diligently
seeking to extend our own opportunities to others, to help to swell
that common tide, on the force and the set of whoso currents depends
the prosperous voyaging of humanity. When our names are blotted
out, and our place knows us no more, the energy of each social
service will remain, and so, too, let us not forget, will each social dis-
service remain, like the unending stream of one of nature’s forces.
The thought this is so may well lighten the poor perplexities of our
doily life, and even soothe the pang of its calamities ; it lifts us
from our feet as on wings, opening a larger meaning to our private
toil and a higher purpose to our public endeavour; it makes the
morning as we awake to it welcome, and the evening like a soft
garment as it wraps us about; it nerves our arm with boldness
against oppression and injustice, and strengthens our voice with
deeper accents against falsehood, while we arc yet in the full noon
of our days— yes, and perhaps it will shed some ray of consola-
tion when our eyes are growing dim to it all, and we go down into

THE EASTERN SITFATION.

In liis Life of the poet Moore, Lord Russell has observed that in free
states the most cultivated and refined minds are frequently opposed
to the prevailing current of popular opinion. The truth of this
remark has been strikingly illustrated in the recent discussions to
which the Eastern Question has given rise. It is needless, of course,
to speak of those whose judgment is obviously biassed by party
affinities or personal aversions. It is only natural that men of
fastidious taste should be offended by the crude expressions and the
unmeasured demands in which popular feeling finds vent, but it will
probably turn out that the able men who carp at the recent move-
ment, have not in general arrived at any different conclusion upon
the essential merits of the case, and therefore that we need not fear
that, at this juncture, the mind of the nation will be separated from
its heart. The burden of the complaints apparently is that such a
question is unfit for the tumult of public meetings, and ought rather
to be left to the unfettered judgment of the Cabinet and to the
unimpassioned deliberations of the Powers.

To these plausible observations it may be answered that, oven in
foreign affairs, in a State with such institutions as ours, it is seldom
that the motive power to action can be supplied by any force but
that of the excited will of the people. Were we living under the
personal government of a sovereign guided by the wisdom and thrf
traditions of an organised bureaucracy, there would be much to be
said against what is called taking matters out of the hands of the
Administration.” We may admire, and we may envy, the just con-
fidence of that German who, being asked why his countrymen had
held no meetings about the Bulgarian horrors, replied, “Wo have a
Government that watches over our interests, and we trust it.” But
it is only stolid or sycophantic partisans who could put forward such
a claim to silent deference on behalf of any recent English minister.
Upon this very Eastern Question, Lord Derby himself requested to
be made acquainted with the instructions of the public. Ever since,
one dull December day a quarter of a century ago, the seals of the
Foreign Office were withdrawn from Lord Palmerston, our foreign
relations have been managed by drifting statesmen. Failing the
prescient guidance of paternal authority, we must resign ourselves
to* an attitude of effacement and wrap our talent in a napkin, unless
we occasionally consent to receive a democratic impulse.

But yet it would be a mistake to assume that all the thoughtless
clamour is on one side, all the matured reason on the other. There

m

THE EASXEEK .SITUATIOK.

is no member of the House of Commons wbo is better qualified to
form a wise opinion upon questions of European policy than Mr.
Laing. His cultiyated and disciplined intelligence has long been
exercised in political and official duties, both at home and in India.
He has enjoyed exceptional opportunities of becoming acquainted
with the a&irs of the principal continental states. The disposition
of his sagacious mind would rather bo to distrust the suggestions of
philanthropic and sentimental enthusiasm. He, at least, has no
dangerous sympathy with Mr. Gladstone’s eloquence ; on the
contrary, he has invariably shown himself friendly to the Govern-
ment. Yet Mr. Laing has unhesitatingly declared against Turkey,
in terms which fall little short of Mr. Gladstone’s famous sentence,
and there ore those who can testify that his judgment was formed
long before the Bulgarian atrocities were known, or even enacted.
Of Mr. Laing certainly it will not be insinuated that he is moved by
any craving after the ceremonial rites of the Eastern Church, or
that he looks with the eye of sympathetic envy upon chartered
chasuble and censer.

If, as is alleged, some public men have obscured this discussion
by exciting popular feeling, others have unquestionably endeavoured
to divert attention from the real issue by the introduction of trivial
or irrelevant Iwics. The Slavs in general, and the Servians in par-
ticular, have been accused of religious intolerance. I cannot enter
into the mysterious question of the Homan Catholic church or
churches, which were built or not built, but which appear not to bo
situated upon Servian territory at all, in the sense, that is, of
"territory subject to Servian laws. After all, it must perhaps be
acknowledged that the Servians are not very indulgent to the Homan
Catholics. But our own national conscience is not so clear upon this
point that we can claim the right to cast a stone at Servia. It
would be absurd to say that that little Principality or any other
Slav country at the present day, can bear compdSison with the
England of fifty years ago. It was only in 1829 that Homan
Catholic Emancipation was conceded, and then with every circum-
stance of discredit. It was wrung by a scared Administration, itself
converted in a panic, from abandoned followers and a reluctant
king. The charge of severity against the Jews is but too well
founded, and it has brought the Turks powerful Allies. Mr. Philip
Cristich has written to the Tmes from Belgrad, to explain that in
Servia the Jews are admitted to scats in parliament, but are not
allowed to reside in the interior of the country, because their infl!u-
ence upon the peasantry is pernicious.” Twenty years ago, a
Servian, visiting our country, ^ght have noted that in England
4h0 Jews were indeed at liberty to reside in the interior, but were not
permitted to become members of parliament. Thus, while the

THE EA6TEBH SITUATION.

663

Servian lawgiver was concerned for the peasantry, he seems to have
felt that Servian senators might be trusted to withstand the evil.
The English legislator, on the other hand, had evidently no fear for
the peasants, but appears to have foreseen the possibility of Jewish
influence demoralising members of parliament. What were the
illusions in each case, at the root of these contrasted apprehensions,
I cannot stop to inquire. Perhaps Sir H. Maine may some day give
us a valuable chapter upon the origin and the comparative effects of
these different systems of restrictivo legislation ; enough for me to
remind that the English charter of Jewish emancipation is so recent
as to be still in its teens ; and the sum of the whole futile con-
troversy is, that in the matter of religious toleration, we are a few
decades in advance of these Slav states, which are about three
centuries behind us in almost every other article of political
development.

If we admit that there is something to be regretted in the popular
emotion which the Eulgarian atrocities have excited, it is certainly
not because the attempts which have been made to extenuate their
gravity can be considered successful. It may be true that in the
delirium of war, nations civilised, European and Christian, have also
been guilty of terrible excesses. But the archives of all previous
iniquity, although diligently ransacked, have failed to furnish any
parallel to the Bulgarian tragedy ; and what even if they had ? Is
vindictive outrage thus to broaden down from precedent to pre-
cedent ? ” The acts of just men are often kept alive in the grateful
recollection of posterity by anniversary celebrations, but we cannot
be asked to commemorate shameful deeds by instituting them a
perpetual standard and an eternal measure of what must bo tolerated
and what may be dared. The inconvenience resulting from the
impression produced upon the public mind by the Bulgarian events,
is that attention has been withdrawn from the permanent features of
the case, and that one great outbreak of ferocity has thrown into the
shade the long course of hopeless misgovernment.

In the public journals of one and the same day, I find the reports
of two speeches, in which witnesses of unexceptionable authority
bear, the one impartial, the other unwilling testimony to the
character of Ottoman rule. Mr. Forster, whose measured statements
have been triumphantly opposed by the friends of Turkey to the
trenchant language of Mr. Gladstone, after describing “ the result
of his own observation in Asia Minor, where the government is that
of Turks by Turks,” and where “ho felt that the people looked
upon the government as their natural enemies, and on good grounds,”
— ^proceeds to speak of the Turkish nilc in the European provinces,
andfrsays — “Property is not safe. The industrious Bulgarians have
excited the envy of their neighbours by their industry, and the

064

THE EASTEBN SITUATION.

fruits of their industry are not safe, and what is far more important,
life is not safe, nor is the honour of women safe from constant out-
rage.’’ One would suppose that insurrection against such a yoke is
not only a right but a duty.

The other speaker was Colonel Loyd Lindsay. Besides having
taken a distinguished part in the Crimean War, he has had good
and very recent opportunities of judging Turkish things. Although
he went to the East upon an errand of compassion, which does him
honour, his views are far from being those of a humanitarian.
Colonel Loyd Lindsay makes no effort to conceal his strong Turkish
bias ; ho attacks Mr. Gladstone, and asks that Turkey should be
maintained. Purely and simply maintained he could not wish it to
be, for writing subsequently to the Times, he introduces a deserved
eulogium upon the Turkish rank and file, with these remarkable
words, “ Withering for all things good, as I believe the Turkish
rule and the Mahommedan faith to be.” His proposal then, is that
the Turkish authorities should be superseded by English officials
in the service of the Porte.” If he supposes that this arrangement
would prove effectual, any one who knows what is the degree of
influence allowed to Europeans in the service of the Porte could tell
him that he is mistaken. English officials would only be powerful
for good if they were constantly supported by England. But thus
to delegate the government of the country to a staff of ^Inglish
officials protected, supported, and of course controlled by England,
is a plan which it would be difficult to distinguish from virtual
annexation. Mr. Grant Duff also proposed that Anglo-Indian func-
tionaries should be called in, but his statesmanlike instinct discerned
that alone such an expedient would be >vorthlcss, and he suggested a
combination, which, however grave the objections to which it may be
open, possessed at any rate the double merit of being at once com-
prehensive and radical.

When we went to war in 1854 we had for allies Frallbe and Sar-
dinia, the rising hope of Italian patriotism ; we were besides sup-
ported by the approval, more or less avowed, of Austria, and by the
sympathies of liberal and unofficial Germany. It is impossible to
observe without misgiving that in the course upon which our Govern-
ment has entered, we have found as yet no coadjutors except the
Turks, the Magyars, and the Vatican. Of these, the Vatican is pro-
bably moved by its old jealousy of the Eastern Church, and by the
hope of obtaining some assistance from the Porte in the dispute
which has long been raging within the Boman Catholic Armenian
communion at Constantinople. The Magyars are with us because,
like the Turks, they exercise dominion over, and maladminister,
though not in anything like the same degree, a large Slav popola-
tion« They also appear to emulate the financial policy of the Porte ;

THE EASIEE^ SITUATION.

656

and their securities, introduced bj Messrs. Bothschild to the London
market, may bo bought at a price to yield a return of about fourteen
per cent. It would be unjust to say that they blight the existence
of their Slav subjects, but at any rate Slav interests of every land
would be better consulted under any other conceivable masters
except the Turks. It is discouraging to see that with none of the
great living forces of the Continent are we at this moment in unison,
and that in on age believed to be one of progress we suddenly find
ourselves in the camp of immobility.

The chronic misgovernmcnt of the European provinces is therefore
the matter upon which action has to be taken. Humiliating indeed
would it be, if Europe, so largely responsible for the existence
hitherto of the Ottoman State, were to lower her aim to demanding
measures only of punishment and repression in Bulgaria. It is
impossible to think without shame of the countrymen of Carlyle
being content to require nothing more than that steps should be
taken to prevent the recurrence of those outrages.” What is above
all to be desired is that this opportunity should be used to obtain, in
as far as may be practicable, a complete and final settlement. In
the material order, it is necessary that the industries of the world,
which have been languishing under a precarious peace, should be
allowed to revive in a period of salutary repose and security. In
the political order, the highest interests require that a question shall
no longer remain open, which invariably, as in 1870, prevents all
effectual concert and co-operation amongst the Powers and leaves us
constantly exposed to the risk of a surprise or an adventure ; and
lastly, in the moral order, seeing how scandalously tho Turks
have abused the authority which they were allowed to exercise
under the protection of Christian states, it is indispensable that
exemplary satisfaction should be given to the offended majesty of
Europe.

Looking at the question in this spirit and with these objects in
view, we may dismiss at once as inadequate, impracticable, and
illusory, the proposal which has been made to leave the Porte in
possession of the government, subject to the control of the Powers,
under stipulations guaranteed by ixeaty. Instead of efiecting a
settlement this cumbrous expedient would do nothing but multiply
causes of jealousy and occasions of intrigue. The rivalry of
ambassadors now concentrated at Constantinople would be dissemi-
nated through the provinces and crop up in the form of consular
competitions, in every seat of local authority ; leaving aside the con-
sideration as to how far it is worthy of Europe, after recent events,
to employ such agents, it is difficult to suppose the Turks capable of
usefplly undertaking the office. Statesmen, indeed, of high merit,
like the late Aali Pacha, they may sometimes produce, but their

656

THE EASTEHSr SITUATION.

govemmeiit is rigidly monarchical and theocratic ; like almost every
Asiatic polity, it is the embodiment of a single idea, and is wholly
unfitted to deal with the various, conflicting, and multiform principles,
elements and interests which move and have their being in any
modern and European community, however undeveloped it may be.
There are many signs that the Turks are unable to bear the con-
tact with Western civilisation and European circumstances. ,In
that contact, they have already lost their distinguishing virtues ;
and this explains the phenomenon observed by Mr. Forster,
and accounts for their conspicuous failure to provide an efficient
government even for their own Mahommedans in their own Asia. The
one merit of their system lies in the omnipotence of the Sovereign
Will, founded upon the perfect union and complete identification of
Church and State. Eooted, as it is with them, in the theocratic
idea, authority itself becomes demoralised if, by laws and institutions,
it be limited as we limit, and circumscribed as we circumscribe it.

With much greater plausibility has it been proposed to grant
autonomy, in some one of several forms, to each of tho afflicted
provinces. There is, however, an ambiguity in tho use of tho term,
which deserves to bo noted. It is employed sometimes to denote
some kind of representative government, sometimes, and more
correctly, to indicate the sort of relation to tho Porte, in which
Koumania and Servia have already been placed. Autonomy, in
fact, has nothing to do with the character of domestic institutions.
The Bussian Empire and the jPTorth American Eepublic arc both
autonomous states. Were the Prince of Servia to subvert the
Servian parliament and make himself an absolute monarch, Servia
would continue to be autonomous, as against the Porte, although
the Servians might perhaps be said to have ceased to be autonomous,
as against their ruler.

<< Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of
different nationalities.^^ This is not the dogma of Machiavelli, or of
any cynical politician ; it was written by the benevolent Mill. In
the Turkish provinces, whose future we are considering, there is,
besides the mixture of races, almost every circumstance which would
render self-government inapplicable. The people are backward ;
they have been long subjected to the most degrading misrule ; they
probably entertain that deep distrust of one another, which abso-
lute power, capriciously exercised, is wont to engender. I challenge
any one to instance a single particular, in which our Indian subjects
are not immeasurably better qualified for constitutional government
than these unhappy Bulgarians and Bosnians. So powerful an instru-
ment for good or for evil cannot be looked upon with indifference.
Tt miurt be either an egg or a scorpion. If an egg, why should we
refuse it to India ; if a scorpion, why should we offer it to the

THE EA6TERK SITUATION.

667

Eoumelian provinces of Turkey ? But, in truth, those who thus
propose to establish representative institutions in countries so little
fitted to receive them, do so without any malevolent intention ; they
arc only repeating one of those platitudes, which, in moments of
emergency, politicians who do not see their way, are accustomed to
produce from the dusty pigeon-holes of their minds.

There remains the plan of an absolute government by a Prince or
Dictator. This undoubtedly would, in this case, be a preferable
arrangement, for, as Mr. Mill observes, “there are conditions of
society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself tho best mode, of
government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to
render them capable of a higher civilisation.” It would be indis-
pensable to the success of such a scheme that the prince should be
supported by a foreign army. Mr. Forster has contemplated the
possibility of a joint occupation ; but joint occupations are perilous
and of ill omen. Tho joint occupation of tho Homan States by
France and Austria, and the “ Condominium,” or joint occupation,
of Schlcswig-IIolstcin by Austria and Prussia furnished successively
pretexts for the Italian and Prussian wars of 1859 and 1866. At
best a joint occupation can only bo a temporary expedient, and
when it is ended wo should find ourselves once again face to face
with the old difficulty. If, on tho other hand, the occupying force
be supplied by a single power, the case would probably prove to be
merely one of disguised annexation and conquest.

The object, it must franlcly be avowed, of all these proposals is to
satisfy the public conscience by removing the grosser scandals of
Turkish administratioTi, Muthout adding to the influence of Hussia.
It is impossible, however, to be so cheaply and circumspectly
philanthropic. An impartial consideration of tho question will show
that wo have not hero to deal merely, or even principally, "with a
demand for tolerable, or even for self-government. Wo have to
encounter in a new shape and on a virgin soil, those national
aspirations with which tho history of the last thirty years ought to
have made us familiar. The attempt to persuade us that we may,
in this case, indulge liberal inclinations, without sacrificing, or
rather, on the contrary, while even advancing our interest as the
rivals or antagonists of Hussia, ought not to be allowed to succeed.
Those so reasoning, neglect the warnings of the history of the
present crisis. Let there be a reformed and supervised Turkish
administration, self-governing provinces, autonomous principalities,
or federated republics ; whenever Hussia may give the signal, these
Slav populations will all advance and help her to plant her standard
upon the shores of the Bosphorus. The present insurrectionary
movement began in the summer of 1875 ; it was not, as is commonly
supposed, instigated by Hussia ; but had its origin chiefly in the

668

THE EASIEBN SITUATIOH.

concert of Turkish with Austrian Slavs, not entirely, it is alleged,
without the connivance of the local Austrian authorities, with a Slav
general at their head, whose action was probably not very severely
condemned at the Imperial Court of Vienna. Servia has been
acting all along in intimate union with the Slavs on the northern
bank of the Save, or on the left bank of the Danube. The cele-
brated political and religious association, the Omladina, has
perhaps more extensive ramifications in the border-lands of Austro-
Hungary than in Servia itself. In possession of her full autonomy,
unmolested and unthreatened, Servia would not have moved, had
she not been impelled by what, for want of a better word, I must
call the solidarity of the Slav race. The truth is, the Slavs in those
regions cannot but see that, although forming a majority of the
population in Austria, a majority in Hungary and a majority in
European Turkey, they are a state nowhere. This being the case,
the attraction to Eussia is and must remain irresistible. Russia is
at the head of their race, at the head of their religion, the highest
expression of their undying hatred to the Turk.

In support of the feasibility of the schemes against which I am
arguing, the example of Eoumania has been cited. Mr. Gladstone,
in general wonderfully accurate in his references to local circum-
stances in the East, has spoken of the success of Eoumania in terms
which seemed to some acquainted with the country, to be slightly
exaggerated, and with a confidence in its presenting a barrier against
Russian aggression, which appeared not only exaggerated bnt mis-
placed. But the circumstances of Roumania were peculiarly favour-
able to the experiment, which, after all, is only recent. The last
ten years have been passed under the reign of a prince who has
enjoyed aU the prestige, and perhaps not the prestige only, of
belonging to the house of victorious Caesar, but even he has been once
certainly, and probably more than once, so discouraged as seriously
to contemplate abdication. In the next place, govj^mment in
Roumania is facilitated by the fact that, while the peasantry staud
in some respects on even a lower level than in Bulgaria, there is a
wealthy and cultivated, though licentious territorial aristocracy.
Lastly and above all, it must be observed that the Roumanians are
not, except in a small admixture, of Slav origin, and that, in their
language the predominant element is Latin. It is difficult to
attimh too much weight to this last peculiarity. The treasures of
the Latin languages are easily accessible to them. French is
perhaps more generally understood, it is certainly more fluently
spoken at Bucharest, and even in other large Roumanian towns (pt
which, it should be noted, there are several) than in London. If it be
tnie that their historical antagonism to Turkey and religious sympathy
dratf the Roumanians towards the Czar, they nevertheless resemble

TH9 EASTEB^ SITUATIOX.

659

the Greeks^ and they diflfer from the Slav peoples in this, that they
have for their culture an ideal and a type which are not Russian.

There are always some minds, which, under the pretext of resisting
centralisation, prefer parochial to national institutions. There are in
all countries local magnates, who do not like to part with any portion
of their personal importance, and possibly reformers in older States
may have encountered this obstacle to plans of beneficent legislation.
But in all probability, when adroit Slav leaders discourse to the
delighted Englishman of the blessings of local self-government and
abound in the sense of their wishing to be free, before all things, in
order that they maybe independent of Russia, it means nothing more
than that they have got the length of their visitor's foot, and know
how to caress his foibles. It is not surprising that they should often
succeed even with travelling members of parliament, for they have
not always failed when dealing with wary and experienced men.
The excellent Mr. Longworth, who for many years represented
England at Belgrad, and who had much acquaintance with the
East, was almost induced, by the Regent Blagnavatz then virtually
at the head of the Servian State, to believe that Servia had no
sympathy with Russia. The present Austrian Minister for Foreign
Affairs, Count Julius Andrassy, then the dexterous Premier of
Hungary, although he was served by a very able agent, devoted to
the interests, as it was said, to the separate interests of Hungary,
was for a time led to indulge a like illusion. In the autumn of
1871, the public was startled by the sudden announcement that the
young Prince was about to visit the Emperor of Russia. Speaking
at that time to a foreigner with whom he frequently conversed, the
Regent Blagnavatz said : “We have resolved to take the Prince to
Livadia. The fact is, the German Consul-General lately returned
and told us that we had nothing to expect from Berlin ; well, with
Germany indifferent, France powerless, Austro-Hungary hostile,
and England Turkish, wo have nothing left but to place our faith in
Russia." The events of the present year have sufficiently proved
how intimate have been the relations between St. Petersburg and
Belgrad.

Possibly, if plans of this kind had been proposed twenty years ago,
they might have been acceptable and efficacious, but we cannot be
blind to the fact that the Slav populations have been deeply, and it
must be added naturally, moved by the recent changes in Europe.
The reconstitution of the Austrian monarchy on the dualistic system,
according to which the Slavs, although, as I have before said, a
'majority in the empire, and in each half of it, were left absolutely
without real infiuence or authority, could not but be mortifying to a
race with any sense of dignity or self-respect. Again, it was impos-
sible for the Slavs, impressionable as they are, to be unaffected by the

VOL. XX. N.S. Y Y

660

THE EA£RCEBN SITUATION.

spectacle of Italy and Germany successiyely united, or to remain free
from the strong contagion of national ambition. The most sanguine
advocate of the various degrees and species of autonomy will not
venture to hope that within any reasonable period such improvised
states could ever be raised to anything like the level of those flourish-
ing little kingdoms and duchies which were mediatised or annexed in
1866. Yet “ Particularism ” in Germany, where it was most popular
and respectable, and “Municipalism** in Italy, where it was embodied
in ancient and august municipalities, were subverted, in order that
the ground might be cleared for the erection of great unifled
monarchies. The system now proposed is nothing but a novel, and
at the same time posthumous attempt to transplant to an unprepared
and unfavourable soil that withered system of particularist and
municipal organizations; but after Solferino, after Sadowa, it will
be impossible to endow them with vital energy.

There ought, then, to be no misapprehension as to the bearings of
the question. In so far as, on general grounds of European policy,
it may bo found necessary or convenient to indulge the inclinations
of the Slav peoples of Turkey, we must, as regards the part they
may in future take in international affairs, be prepared to see them
become the confederates of Bussia. If for any reason it be thought
unsafe to give such a contingent accession of strength to the Czar, it
will be necessary to place the liberated provinces under the tutelage
of some stronger and more efficient guardian than a Turkish pacha
or an autonomous princeling.

So far as the immediate interest of these provinces is concerned, it
is not difficult to discern their present requirements. What is above
all things necessary is that they should be placed under a govern-
ment strong, giving every guarantee of the permanence of its rule,
leaving no prospect open of a change of masters — a government
able to provide for the impartial administration of justice and for the
security of life and property. It must be in a position to dispose of
a body of able civil servants, and to establish an independent and
cultivated, and, in order that it may be independent and cultivated,
a salaried, priesthood. It must have great financial resources at its
command, so as to be able to construct harbours in the Black Sea and
at the head of the Strymonic Gulf, railways, urgently-needed roads,
and before all, perhaps, to undertake the gradual )*eBtoration of the
devastated forests. Ascending to a higher order, the new ruler must
enrich his subjects with the advantages belonging to a powerful state.
He must, by giving them a language, bring them into communion
with a great people, and open new methods of culture. He must
off er the producers markets, the writers a public, the civil, political,
and xoiliiary servants a career.

There are only four European Powers which would be qualifi^

THE BASTEEN SITUATION.

661

by their military and other resources to fulfil the conditions indis-
pensable for such a part. Of these England and France are clearly
out of the question, although it is probable that the French would
prove sympathetic rulers, and would find, in these members of the
great Slav family, subjects gratefully receptive of their congenial
legislation and culture. Eut neither England nor France could
embark in a distant enterprise which, successful or not, could for
long years bring to them nothing but charges, and expose them
to risks which would eflfoctually fetter their freedom of action.
Only Russia and Germany remain.

I have left out of view, thus far, all considerations afiecting the
special interest of England, and yet that interest is of so great
moment to the civilised world that we need not hesitate to discuss it
without periphrasis or circumlocution. A recent traveller, M. Duret,^
an able and impartial writer, in a work which deserves to be more
widely known, offers a splendid tribute to the great achievements of
our Indian rule. A country which is doing so good a work upon so
extensive a scale, which is rendering such signal services to two hun-
dred millions of men, has a right to be heard before anything is decided,
which, however otherwise expedient, may tend either to embarrass its
action or to impair its authority. Mr. Forster, in his recent speech,
has succinctly demonstrated that our policy in Turkey ought not to
be affected by the supposed desires of our Mussulman subjects in
India. When the question is carefully examined, it will be found
that our concern in European Turkey is limited to the possible
danger which might threaten our communications with India by
Suez, were Constantinople, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles to
come into the possession of a great and independent Power. The
government of Constantinople itself, by the Porte, is not open to any
serious reproach, and, as Mr. Gladstone has admitted, might well be
maintained by Europe in a European interest. But if important
provinces were detached from Turkey, and became actually or
virtually Russian, it would be difficult to look upon Constantinople
as secure, and therefore we must contemplate the possibility of its
falling into Russian hands.

It must be confessed that apart from the danger to our Indian
route, there is much from the point of view of our own exclusive
interest, which ought to reconcile us to the prospect of Russia
becoming more largely identified with Europe. For us, it can
hardly be politic to be driving her farther and farther into Asia, to
leave her no scope for expansion excepting there, and to make her
ambition exclusively Asiatic, ^e more we remove her from contact
with Europe, the more she becomes unassailable, impalpable. In
that lonely region and in that distant sphere she excites no European

(1) Voyage en Asie,” par Theodore Duret. Paxis. 1876.

T Y 2

662

TH£ EASTEHK SIXUATIOX

jealousy^ and^ tHerefore^ in the event of our being involved in a
conflict with ber^ we could expect no European aid, although our
isolated and menaced position might well arouse and arm the slum-r
bering animosity of rivals in either hemisphere. In Asia Eussia has
England for her only enemy, and an enemy deprived of allies.

Viewing the subject from higher ground and in a larger and more
generous spirit, let us ask ourselves if it bo really wise to yield
nothing to national tendencies and aspirations, and to prevent
Eussia from obtaining a capital, where the Slav civilisation, no longer
icebound, might freely developc, and taking rank in time with the
Latin, Teutonic and mixed forms, now existing, contribute something
to the sum of the political ideas of the world.

Were such considerations to prevail, the special interest of England
might be secured by precautionary measures of defensive policy, by a
military occupation, or by an eventual annexation. Some have pro-
posed that we should seize upon Qallipoli and make ourselves masters
of the Dardanelles, but if wo had resolved that it would be just and
politic to yield Constantinople, thus to retain in our own hands the
key of the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus, would bo “ to keep
the word of promise to the car and break it to the hope.” Crete,
again, has frequently been suggested, but the strategic reasons must
be very powerful to counterbalance the disadvantage of engaging
once more in the government of unwilling subjects, and of departing
from the policy to which wo made the sacrifice of surrendering the
Ionian Islands. It would be better in the event of the partition of
the Turkish Empire to let Crete and some of the Greek provinces
of the mainland be annexed to Greece, the Powers taking the
opportunity to stipulate some salutary changes in the Greek Con-
stitution, which only external influence is likely to effect. While
these objections apply to the acquisition of Gallipoli and Crete, the
occupation, and ultimately, perhaps, the annexation of Egypt is the
measure of insurance most obviously indicated, being jit once the
most effectual from a military point of view and the least likely to
lead to political inconvenience. In Egypt, we should be moving in
a sphere cognate to that in which we have already succeeded. Our
rule could only bo beneficial to a people suffering under enormous
exactions, which have, however, failed to avert financial disorder
and bankruptcy. By the European Powers our establishment in
Egypt, for which they are not unprepared, is not likely to be seriously
questioned, if opportunely effected, inasmuch as the purchase of the
Suez Canal shares, which was generally understood to point to such
a result, has called forth no jealous^monstrance.

I have made no allusion to Awria, to whom the language of
Lord Derby, and the frequent suggestions of the journos, may
have encouraged us to look for some decisive action in the Eastern

THE EA6IEBH SHUATION.

663

question. But the fact is that Austria^ although disposing of mili-
tary fojrces, which, were she free to use them without anxiety or
apprehension, would possibly enable her to confront Eussia with
success, is only by courtesy a great Power. Since 1866, and the
adoption of the dualistic constitution, a State she cannot be called.
The real position of the monarchy is accurately described in the
following extract from a letter written in October, 1868, by an
observant traveller : The present activity in railway and other
enterprise, and the general prosperity, must not be mistaken for
proofs of a sound political condition. They are accounted for by the
fact that in other countries there was not much more to do, and the
turn of Austria was come. The superlative harvest of last year,
with scarcity prevailing elsewhere, followed by the good yield of the
present season, has provided the cash. As a State, Austria has been
sensibly weakened by the recent changes. There used to be at any
rate three great bonds of union amidst the general confusion, but
now they are all, to say the least, considerably weakened. First,
the Church, by the late anti-ecclesiastical legislation, and by the
growing religious indifference. Still more injurious is, secondly,
the unstatesmanlike substitution of a national for a professional
army. Having been beaten by Prussia, they have jumped to the
conclusion here that they ought to adopt the Prussian military system.
Admirable in a homogeneous State, the Prussian Organisation is
quite unsuited to the composite Austria. What is worst of all, the
third great force that might have been trusted to keep the Monarchy
together, the Crown, has been obliged to put its prerogatives into
commission, or rather into two commissions, one at Vienna and one
at Pest, speaking different languages and following different tenden-
cies.” We have been accustomed to contemplate the inconveniences
which would arise from the concession of Home Eule to Ireland; but
we must suppose Ireland almost a match for Great Britain in extent
and population, we must suppose the Parliaments of London and
Dublin of co-equal authority, and further the Irish Parliament
speaking a language of its own and refusing to receive any communi-
cation in English, before we can have an idea, and then only an
imperfect one, of the disorder created by the dualism of Austro-
Hungary. As at present constituted, the Monarchy is composed of
one bundle of nationalities, with its capital at Vienna, and of
another with its capital at Pest, the object being apparently, in the
first case, to subject the Austrian Slavs to the Germans^ and, in the
other, the Hungarian Slavs, more detrimentally to themselves and
with less reason, to the Mamars. This nicely-balancod scheme of
political injustice would proftbly be overturned by the addition of
new Slav districts to the dominions of either Crown, and that is why
the ruling Germans and Magyars, the latter however with far more

664

THE EASIEBH SITUATIOK.

unanimity and emphasis than the former, have been from the first
unwilling to entertain any projected annexation, while equally averse
to the formation of a now independent State, which might excite a
dangerous sympathy amongst the Slavs of their southern border. In
the Ois-Leithan, or Austrian Empire, the antagonism to the Slavs is
of a milder kind and may be explained in some degree by differences
of political and religious sentiment; nevertheless, the Germans,
although not dissatisfied with their present position, contemplate their
eventual incorporation with, the German Empire as a contingency
preferable to making any important concession to the Slavs or even
to submitting to any further exigencies of tho Ilungarian Magyars.
On the other hand, however much they may at times have been
disposed to listen to the adroit flattery of Prince Bismarck’s agents,
tho Hungarian Magyars are wcU aware that no state of things
which is likely to exist could be more favourable to their exclusive
interests than the present. But that arrogant race, which brooks
no equality, rebellious if it be not dominant, would infinitely prefer
annexation to Germany to seeing the Ilungarian Slavs invested with
power corresponding to their superior numbers, or to tho risk of
Bussian influence prevailing. Thus in each half of the Empire, the
ruling section is only conditionally and provisionally contented, and
it is obvious that upon such an allegianee with an if,” and upon
such a patriotism with a ‘‘ but,” no solid authority can be built.

It might have been expected that this common aversion to the
Slav element would in the recent complications, at least, have
enabled the monarchy consistently to follow an unwavering line
with confident strength. But the Emperor-King pursues different
aims, and has adopted, as far as possible, another policy. He well
knows that of all his subjects the Slavs, and especially those of the
Bomon Catholic Church, stand almost alone in attachment without re-
servation or afterthought to his throne and dynasty. If what disturbs
Germans, and what terrifies Magyars, is the spectre of Slay encroach-
ment, with him the skeleton in the cupboard is the German Empire.
Kot between him and either moiety of his monarchy can there sub-
sist the firm friendship of the idem velk and the idem nolle. Both at
home and abroad his dynastic interest is separate, and his personal
policy divergent from that of each of his present Austrian and
Hungarian cabinets. At home he would naturally like to see the
Slavs reconciled, or rather preponderant ; abroad he would desire to
see Bussia aggrandised, as a counterpoise to Germany. It is impos-
sible not to pity the sorrows of this unfortunate sovereign, who
deserved a more prosperous reign and a less adverse destiny. If we
are to believe thoso who have enjoyH opportunities of approaching
him, he possesses qualities which would have mado him an incom-
p^t^e chief of a free state, with blending and consistent elements.

THE EASTEEH 6ITUAII0H,

665

and with settled institutions. Although seldom sustained by any
sanguine hope, he is laborious almost beyond example, and patient ;
he may even be described as ascetic in the indefatigable discharge of
his manifold duties, in which he is aided by rare attainments as an
accomplished linguist, but yet his gloomy foreboding of palamity is
probably a true presentiment ; no happy intuition guides his mono-
tonous steps, and no spark of genius illurniines his difficult path.

It is only, therefore, as the executioner of the will of Germany
that Austria, condemned by her distracted politics, to a satellite or
vassal existence, could authoritatively interfere in a new distribution
of the European possessions of Turkey, and I repeat that unless these
provinces be left entirely to Russia, and in so far as they can be
eflFectually withhold from coming under Russian control, they can
only be German. But what, it may be asked, is the interest of
Germany in the question, seeing that she is separated by an exten-
sive tract of intermediate country from all contact with the Balkan
peninsula ? The answer is that Germany has never ceased to con-
sider herself the heir in reversion of the Austrian Empire, or at least
of such portions of it as were formerly included in the Germanic
Confederation. It is possible that Prince Bismarck would be anxious,
at present at least, and so long as his conflict with the Church con-
tinues, to avoid imdcrtaking the direct government of a large addi-
tional Roman Catholic population ; but in the chances and changes of
the Eastern Question it is difficult to suppose that he would not gladly
avail himself of any favourable opportunity which the necessities of
Austria may offer, and recur to the proposal which he is believed to
have already made in 1871, and seek to establish a customs, postal,
telegraphic, and perhaps monetary union between the two empires.
Whether or not this plan, which would involve the virtual mediatisa-
tion of Austria, or any other of a similar tendency, be now entertained,
it is impossible to suppose that the great minister would tolerate any
change essentially modifying the distribution of political power
amongst the various races subject to the Emperor Francis Joseph’s
rule. He is known to have protested, five years ago, against the
scheme by which Count Hohenwart, with no great felicity of con-
ception or management, and when it was already too late, endea-
voured to satisfy the demands of the Slav element. No one ac-
quainted with the internal condition of Austria will believe that
Germany would be indifferent to such an aggrandizement of Russia
as would encourage the Austrian Slavs to adopt an attitude of defi-
ance and compel a recognition of their rights. The German victories
of 1866, and especially of 1^0, produced a marked change in the
bearing of the Austrian Gemans, transferring, partially at least,
their centre of political gravity from Vienna to Berlin ; and it can-
not be doubted that if Russia Were allowed to exercise dominion

666

THE EASIEBN STTUATIOE.

more or less direct over the countries between the Black Sea and the
Adriatic^ the attractive magnet of her power would be felt in
almost every province of the Hapsburgh state, for in almost every
one, with the considerable exceptions of Upper and Lower Austria,
the Slav element is the more numerous, and this is even the case in
Bohemia and Moravia, which are immediately contiguous to Ger-
many. This being the case, it would probably have been more
politic in our own Government to have been less precipitate in putting
England forward as the champion of Turkey, and as the State chiefly
or alone interested in checking the advance of Bussia. Beserve and
efiacement on our part might perhaps have indueed the Cabinet of
Berlin to break through its mysterious silence — some might be in-
clined to say its sinister taciturnity.

However little one may be disposed to give way to the alarm
excited by the prospect of Bussia’s extension and Panslavism, it
must be evident that if the dissolution of the Turkish Empire were
to lead to tlie acquisition immediate or indirect by Bussia of the
mouths of the Danube, Constantinople, and the rest of the Ottoman
provinces, which, with the exception of the slight fringe of Austrian
territory inhabited principally by Slavs with some Italians in the
towns, extend to the Adriatic, such a Power being free to work
upon the numerically preponderating and kindred element in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire might become a source of possible
danger to Europe. It would bo otherwise, however, if Austria
being actually or impliedly absorbed, Germany became herself an
Adriatic and Danubian Power. In such a case, the absurd and
distracting dualistic constitution would have ceased to exist, and a
strong and respected government, giving every guarantee of perma-
nence, and therefore leaving it possible to no foreign element in its
midst to nurse the hope of escaping from its rule, would be able
gradually to blend the Austrian provinces into a consistent whole,
and at least to supersede where it failed to assimilate. Jn the fiirm
grasp of BO great an empire, extending from Dantzig and Hamburgh
to Trieste and Cattaro, far down the Adriatic, there would be no fear
of Bussia exercising any dangerous influence upon the Slavs at
present governed from Vienna. Perhaps Germany might desire,
by allowing Hungary to remain in a state of quasi-independence,
by leaving Servia autonomous, and creating a zone of neutral
territory down to the port of Salonica in the Archipelago, to
prevent the immediate contact of the two empires along so ex-
tended a frontier. Such an arrangement would chiefly be regret-
table in the interest of the Hungarian peoples, and perhaps in
that of the inhabitants of the neutralized provinces. But par-
titioois are prov^bially difficult, and there are so few examples ol
cn,e g^eat and ambitious power aiding another, of anything like equal

THE EASTERN SITUATION.

667

rank^ in designs of expansion and aggrandizement, that possibly even
with Trieste, the Dalmatian harbours, and Salonica his. Prince
Bismarck might be unwilling to yield the lower Danube and Con-
stantinople. The most extravagant schemes which have ever been
attributed to conquering Germany are certainly modest when com-
pared with those which were present to the boundless view of the
great If^apoleon. Nevertheless, at a moment when he had the
greatest interest in conciliating the Emperor of Bussia, at the time
of the memorable conferences of Tilsit, Napoleon would never bring
himself to consent to Bussia’s extension southward beyond the
line of the Balkans, and persisted in closing the hope of obtaining
Constantinople against the eager vision of the sanguine Alexander.
One emperor has already had reason to repent the trust that he
placed in the luring suggestions of Prince Bismarck, and it may be
that a later Alexander would do well to ponder the fato of a later
Napoleon. It is bewildering to look along the vista of possible
combinations opened by these events, nor is it as yet perfectly cer-
tain which may be the ambition which Europe, in a near future, will
have most reason to fear and to combat.

But whatever the surprises and vicissitudes which the future has
in store for us, it is something to be fixed in our opinions upon some
particulars. It is something to apprehend correctly the real cha-
racter of the Slav movement, and to have our attention directed to
the limits within which it may be prudent to favour its progress. .
It is essential to realise the fact that there are now at least two things
rotten in the European commonwealth, the Turkish Empire and
the Austrian, and that comprehensive changes in the former must
involve a radical reconstruction of the latter ; that if it be necessary
to guard against the undue expansion of Bussia, we must not trust
to constables so discredited as Turkish pachas or so feeble as impro-
vised grand dukes, but must look for changes which, perhaps
through the medium of a dependent Austria, would place the
Slav provinces under the strong arm of German custody; and
that if the supremo interest of Europe requires, as may occasionally
be the case, that national aspirations should be controlled, repressed,
or superseded, it is right and politic that the welfare of those whose
desires are thus postponed should as far as possible be consulted, and
that they should be placed in conditions favourable to their material
and intellectual developments. To the Christian provinces of Turkey
in particular, Europe owes a signal act of reparatory justice.

In the combinations which I have been supposing, and according to
which the Ottoman Slavs might come partly under German, partly
under Bussian influence, it is not easy to determine which of these
would, to the people, be the more beneficial. Germany, on the one
hand, would bring a better government, a more enlightened adminis-

668

THE EASIEBE^ SITITATION.

tration^ an older and more advanced culture^ a language richer in
acciuniilated stores of every hind. The antipathy of Slav to G-erman
might prevent the new subjects from deriving the full benefit from
the part and share that would be offered them in the many services
and professions of so great a State and People, but it should be
remembered that the Prussians themselves are not of pure Ge^an
descent, that they arc largely Slav, and that the province of East
Prussia itself, of Polish origin, was never admitted to the old Germanic
Confederation, which had its seat at Frankfort. Men of Polish
nationality or extraction are frequently met with' in every rank
of the military and bureaucratic hierarchy. The honoured name of
the Minister Eadowitz is now borne by his son, one of the ablest
members of the German diplomatic body, whose rising talents have
already been distinguished by his discerning government, and
perhaps it will be given to that Servian family to illustrate, in two
generations, the Prussian land of their adoption.

In favour of Eussia, on the other hand, it may be urged that she
would bring, at first at least, a more congenial and sympathetic rule.
She would have the great advantage of governing subjects already
included within the pale of her National Church. Although the
Eussian administration is immeasurably superior to the Turkish,
Eussia being a younger nation than Germany, the Ottoman Slavs
would find themselves joining a commimity less discouragingly in
advance of their own. During the last twenty years, the Eussian
people, in almost every department of political and intellectual life,
have moved on with rapid strides. Their independent village
communities offer an admirable education in the practice of self-
government; in many parts of the country, the peasants are in
possession of allotments of land which might be envied by the corre-
sponding class in countries of an older civilisation and of more
liberal institutions. The recent passionate outburst of sympathy
with Bulgaria, which is honourable to the Eussian people, and will
endear them still more to their kindred abroad, is not, I believe, the
only, although it may be the most signal, indication of awakening
public spirit. The Eussian people are probably on the eve of some
great political transformation. External events are likely to pre-
cipitate internal changes which have been long maturing. The
liquid metal is in ebullition, and who knows into what new mould
the seething mass will be cast ?

We have looked upon the great Empires as supplying the most
efficient agency for regenerating the Christian populations of Turkey.
Were there no other merit in such a system, that of substituting for
many dialects a single language, would be entitled to the greatest
weight. There are many, I know, who take a different view, and
who not only incline to the formation or the maintenance of small

THB EASTEBK SITUATION.

669

Statesi but seem to revel in the prospect of each obscure being
vamped up to the dignity of a recognised language. Even at a
comparatively late epoch of national life, to uproot an unpromising
dialect, however painful the process to the present, would generally
prove beneficial to succeeding generations. But when the com-
munity is still infant, or at least inartiuulate, there is no room for
doubt or hesitation. A people inconsiderable in number, with a
separate and obscure language, has to encounter the greatest
hindrances to intellectual advancement. In such unpropitious circum-
stances, the scope of ideas is restricted, the sphere of exertion
narrowed, the stature of the mind dwarfed. Into a language, for
instance, which is that of a populous nation, even were it deficient
in original works, the productions of foreign genius, in every depart-
ment of literature, would be translated ; but those who speak the
dioleot of a sparsely-peopled province, must be satisfied with
Pinnock^s Catechisms and Magnal’s Questions, — ^with the meagre
abridgment and the lifeless primer. One would have supposed
that these were principles of elementary and unquestioned truth, but
there are some who think that they are acting the part of enlightened
philanthropy and statesmanship in encouraging provincial fondness
for a provincial tongue. The increased importance and the greater
prominence, which recent changes have given to the Hungarian
language, has proved an abundant source of many evils ; let us be
spared a repetition of the error. Strange that liberal and cultivated
minds should consider that expedient a useful method of elevating
man, which jealous omnipotence employed to bewilder the nations
and punish their presumption. There are men amongst us who
would be always perpetuating and renewing the disaster of Babel.
They would probably have voted for the maintenance of the
Heptarchy. They would like to scatter into a hundred torpid
rivulets the living waters of that proud Thames, whose broad stream
carries the ships and the commerce of the world.

Let us hold, then, to our preference for the great Empires. The pre-
judice or the opinion in favour of small and independent States would
be respectable, were it timely. There is every reason to anticipate
that they will again have their day ; but the time for them will, not
have come until the Great Empires shall have done their appointed
work, until they shall have blended races, consolidated languages,
diffused culture, until, in short, they shall have done for modern
generations what the Boman Empire accomplished for medissval
Europe. Mr. Finlay has discovered and described the anarchical
element which really brought about the ruin of that great agglomera-
tion. What the disintegrating force may be before which the great
Empires of modem times will fall, it is difficult to predict. It may

670

THE EASTESN 8IIUAIION.

be the Church under a great Pope, or the rehabilitated Commune—
the Commune in which, in the midst of its excesses. Prince Bismarck
detected a germ of healthy life — or it may be the increasing power
of the Jews.

The early solution of the Eastern question, in a sense favourable to
civilisation and progress, depends chiefly upon Germany. If the
present crisis be prolonged, or if the present dissensions bo tempo-
rarily composed by a delusive compromise, it is to the reticence of
Berlin that the mischief will be owing. The tutelage of poor
and semi-barbarous countries brings no increase of military power,
and indeed, for purposes of military aggression, it would be diffi-
cult to render Germany more formidable than she is. She has
perhaps, at this moment, acquisitions in view more attractive than
Bosnia and Montenegro; but in truth she owes some compen-
sation to the world. To the States which she has hitherto incor-
porated in her empire, it cannot be said that she has brought any
decidedly beneflcial change. In the Saxonies and the Badens, and
even in most of the less favoured States of the old Bund, there was
little room for improved administration. In the opinion of many,
German aimexation has dimmed or extinguished the lights of some
centres of culture which have rendered honourable service in the
post. The three wars which, within a period of seven years, she
waged, if she did not provoke, were perhaps indispensable to the
establishment and consolidation of her empire ; but the rise of her
authority has been accompanied by oppressive additions to the
military burdens of her own, and especially of other Peoples ; and,
what is worse, ever since the fall of Paris, Europe seems to bo living
in an atmosphere of rumours of wars, of restless intrigues, and of
ubiquitous machinations. Let her now, by undertaking to govern
and lift up some down-trodden branches of the human family, prove
that her conquests and annexations may conduce to other and higher
than merely selfish interests. Let Germany then advance, in her
magnificent pride of energy and strength, in this accepted time and
in this golden hour, in order that it may be said of her as of
France, and with equal truth, that she has made great gifts to
mankind.

Ralph A. Eable.

THE RODITAS.

The Bodiyas of Ceylon appear to have attracted somewhat less of
thie attention of ethnologists than they may he fairly said to deserve,
for they are in many respects a remarkable race of people, and one
of which the language, no less than the distinguishing and peculiar
characteristics, are fast disappearing before the advance of civilisation.
They have been popularly supposed to be in some way connected
with the Weddas, although the ethnological affinity of the two tribes
was never precisely defined, and the descent of the Bodiyas has not
been similarly pure and unbroken. The great antiquity, however,
of both races is imdoubted ; but, whilst the Weddas are considered
by the Sinhalese to be of most ancient lineage and the highest caste,
and are consequently regarded with the utmost deference and respect,
the Bodiyas, on the other hand, are treated with the most humiliating
contempt and abhorrence in literal accordance with the significance
of their name “ Bodiya,” which implies rubbish or filth.

The first historical mention which we have of tho Bodiyas occurs,
apparently, in tho tenth chapter of th'' 'Muhawanso, the great Sinhalese
chronicle, whore they are referr a l lo as Chandalas, five hundred of
whom wore employed by Kir:: ^ undukfibhaya as scavengers of his
city Anuradhapura in the year 437 w.c. Two hundred more were
appointed nightmen, one hundred and fifty carriers of corpses, and
a similar niunber were employed at the cemetery. On the north-
west of the cemetery the king established a village for these people,
and they constantly performed their work under his directions. To
the north-oast of tffis Chandala village ho established a village of
Nichichondalos to servo as cemetery men to tho low castes. The
Bodiyas are mentioned in the Bajavali in the year 204 b.c., and in
the Mahawanso (ch. xlii.) in tho year 589 a.d. From the earliest
fimnn their social condition was the very lowest, a circumstance
accoimted for by various conjectures. Knox considered them to be
a branch of tho Weddas, who were degraded and made outcasts
from society, because upon one occasion they served up human flesh
to tho king, in the place of venison, with which it was their duty to
supply the royal table. But their robust appearance and tall figures
at once show that they are on entirdy distinct race from the Weddas,
and also dispose of the theory that they were driven into the jungle
on account of their leprosy. The tradition which they themsdves
have handed down, and which they believe, is that they are Sinhalese
in origin, being descended from a daughter of King Perakumba, a
name which is, I think, unknown in the Sinhalese chronicles, who

m

THE BODITAS.

became enraged with his daughter for some reason or other, and
gave her in marriage to a scavenger, and turned her and her offspring
out of his city for over.

At the present time they exist in numbers which, in the
aggregate, perha]^ exceed one thousand, and are believed to be
decreasing in various parts of the island of Oeylon, but only in
those districts which form what is known as the hill country.
They live in separate communities, each of which is called a kup-
payama, for they are not allowed to call their place of residence
by the usual name, gama, or village, and they are found in Uwa,
Sabaragamuwa and the seven Xorales in several places. There is
one kuppayama in Dumbara, and one in Kotmale, two in Walapane,
one at Xadugannawa, and others in the Matale district; but all
these localities are a long distance from each other, and thus
give no ready opportunities for regular intercourse between their
inhabitants. They nevertheless converse in the language which is
wholly peculiar to themselves, and have identical customs and
observances. In the time of the early Kandyan kings, as Sir
Emerson Tennant has recorded, they were not permitted to cross a
ferry, to draw water at a well, to enter a village, or learn a trade, as
no recognised caste could deal or hold intercourso with a Bodiya.
They do not, however, seem to have been, as he supposed, dis-
qualified for cultivating land, although, for the most part, they wore
forced to subsist on alms or such gifts as they might receive for
protecting the fields from wild beasts, or burying &e carcasses of
dead cattle ; but they were not allowed to come within a fenced field
even to beg. They converted the hides of animals into ropes, and
prepared monkey skins for covering tom-toms and drums which they
bartered for food and other necessaries. They were prohibited from
wearing a cloth on their heads, and neither men nor women were
allowed to cover their bodies above the waist or below the knee. If
benighted, they dare not lie down in a shed appropriated to other
travellers, but hid themselves in caves or deserted watch huts. They
could not enter a court of justice ; and if wronged, had to utter their
complaints from a distance. Many of these social restrictions have
now been removed, although it must be confessed that in their
general spirit they are still recognised; and it is stated by Sir
Charles Marshall, a former chief justice of Ceylon, that so late as
in the year 1834 a question arose whether a Bodiya, who was to be
examined as a witness in one of the courts of justice in the southern
parts of the island, ought not to prostrate himself on the occasion of
taking the oath, in accordance with the ceremony which was repre-
srated. to be prescribed by custom for persons of that class, and the
mattw was considered to be so doubtful and of so much importance
that it was referred to the king’s advocate, who consulted the chief
justice upon the subject.

XHS BODITAS.

678

Notwithstaaduig the improTed system of govemment which the
English rule has introduced into the Kandyan proyinces, and which
has naturally tended to ameliorate the condition of the Bodiyas^ their
pursuits and habits remain practically the same as they ever were ;
while the whole spirit and feeling with which the Sinhalese people
have always regarded them^ is still seen in the way in which their
very touch, and even their shadow, is avoided, and held to contami-
nate and render impure any object upon which it may happen to
fall. The mendicant life which they have led for many centuries
has made them averse from labour or industry, and they are
universally reputed to be thieves; whilst the state of degradation
to which they have been invariably subjected shows itself to-day in
their instinctive habit of crouching or falling on their knees with
uplifted hands to a man of any respectable Sinhalese caste. It is
open to doubt whether, as Sir Emerson Tennant states,^ “their
appetites arc omnivorous, and carrion is acceptable to them.^’ I
never found any indication of such a practice, and all the Bodiyas
whom I questioned upon the point denied that they were ever
addicted to it ; but it is probable, as Mr. Simon Cassie Chetty has
observed in his account of the Bodiyas, printed in the Journal of
the Ceylon Asiatic Society,® that at the time when they were not
permitted to hunt or shoot any game, they had recourse, of necessity,
to the carcasses of animals which had ^ed a natural death. The
political and social position of the Bodiyas under the Kandyan
dynasty, which terminated in the early part of the present century,
is minutely explained in a MS. work by Sir John D’Oyley, entitled,
“ A Sketch of the Constitution of the Kandyan Kingdom.’’ The
author, who evidently spared no pains in collecting his informatibn,
gives an account of tho localities which they inhabited, and the
lands which they severally possessed. Those who lived in tho seven
Korales were under the control of the first Adigar, or prime minister
of the king, and all the others under the control of the second Adigar.
But previously to the reign of King Baja Singha (1582 — 1592) there
was only one Adigarship,and there were reputed to be only four Bodiya
families in the hill country, whose duty was to furnish every year
whips for the Adigar’s use, kodisawaram, or tassels made of niyenda,
to be appended to flags and banners, and ropes made of thongs for
catching elephants. The Hirage Kankonama, or jailor, had the
authority of appointing one of the Bekawal people to be Hulawa-
liya over the Bodiyas, and this Hulawaliya, or headman, appointed
a Gbsmanda from amongst the Bodiyas under his authority; and
thus, as Sir Emerson Tennant says, although they were per-
mitted to have a headman, his nomination was stigmatized by
requiring the sanction of tho common jailor. Tho Gasmanda
(1) " Ceylon,” vol. ii. p: 190. (2) Vol. ii. No. 8.

674

THE BOBITJIS.

was SO called from the large rope or . cable made of thongs,
which he furnished for the service of catching elephants {gahaf a
tree ; mmda^ a noose). That was the largest kind of rope made for
this purpose ; the other Bodiyas of his kuppayama furnishing the
smaller ropes. They were allowed to have oilj one slanting roof
for each hut, and a cadjan screen with a hide on it for a door. They
were never allowed to cross a river in a boat, nor to travel through
a royal village, nor to walk on the embankment of a canal in the
royal fields. Consequently the Bodiyas of Dumbara and of TJwa could
have no communication with each other, and therefore those of the
latter province were chiefly under the orders and control of the
Dissawa, or chieftain of tho district. When a Bodiya was accused
of robbery or cattle stealing, the Hulawaliya made report thereof to
the Hirage Eankanama, or jailor, who thereupon sent men to bring
up the accused to the ferry on an appointed day, when not only the
culprit was brought up, but all the rest of his kuppayama also were
collected. The Hirage Kankanama went over, and the culprit being
secured, some Bodiyas of another kuppayama were directed to punish
him by flogging him with thorny twigs and hard knotted keppetiya
sticks. The offender was then sent away to be confined in tho stocks,
with which each kuppayama was furnished. When accused of more
serious crimes, such as seizing women of the Wellala, or highest
caste, or of plundering villages, which they sometimes did in large
numbers like banditti, the oflenders were put to death by order of
the Adigar. They were confined in stocks, and placed in an elephant
track, where they died of starvation, unless trampled on and killed
by elephants, ^^en one or two Bodiyas only were to be put to
death, persons of the same caste were employed as executioners ; but
when a whole Bodiya village merited destruction from being guilty
of outrageous acts of robbery and plunder and seizing Wellala women,
and the like, then persons of other castes surrounded the kuppayama,
and destroyed all its inhabitants, without discriminating sex or age,
the innocent or the guilty, as was once done when one Angammena
was Dissawa of Uwa. The Bodiyas of Paranagama were accused
of having seized women from the Bata villages, and of having
committed highway robberies, whereupon they were so chastised.
Thirty were killed on that occasion, and only one Bodiya, with a
few women and children, escaped. The kuppayama was then set
fire to, and wholly destroyed.

Such, then, is an outline of the social condition of these people as
it has existed from time immemorial, a condition of abject and
complete degradation, the origin and reason of which is unknown.*
It has been perpetuated with a rigorous exactness, and acquiesced in
by itsL subjects without any show of impatience, although the con-
trary might have been expected from a class of people amongst

THE EOHITAS.

675

the maleB have been commonly distingaisbed by a fine
pbysque^ whilst the females have become proverbial for their hand-
some featured and superiority of form to their more favoured neigh-
bours. These circumstances would alone seem to indicate a dis-
similarity of ^e between the Kodiyas and the Sinhalese people, of
whom they have commonly been assumed to be an integral portion.
The dissimilarity is, however, more clearly shown when we analyze
the physical characteristics, and the customs and the language of the
Bodiyas.

A Kodiya is, as a rule, differentiated by a tall stature and a
well-formed head, with straight and regular features ; the nose
is long, and not flattened, and the lips often thin, the countenance
having generally an intelligent appearance, notwithstanding the
constant aspect of humiliated servility which has been already
explained; they speak in a peculiarly hollow, deep, and sing-
song tone of voice, which is entirely foreign to the accent of the
Kandyans, and I have frequently been struck by the tendency
amongst them to become, as I thought, rather prematurely grey-
headed ; they are not, as a rule, short-lived people, although a
venerable-looking white beard, at the age of from forty to forty-
five, is by no means uncommon, and this, as well as the other points
which I have noticed, would at once enable any person, seeing them
for the first time, to discriminate them from amongst a crowd of
Sinhalese people. There exists in the Kandyan country a caste of
persons named the Kinnarayas, to whom they bear a resemblance,
although there is apparently no direct afiinity between the two
classes. They occupy a similarly degraded position, and it is worthy
of remark that, although this degradation, with all its attendant «
disabilities, has been continued from the earliest ages, it has in no
respect resulted in any sort of physical inferiority. Indeed the
features and the head of an average Bodiya or Kinnaraya are nearly
identical with those of the European races, and serve sufficiently of
themselves to demonstrate the fact that neither people is, as has been
supposed, ethnologically connected with the Weddas, a race exhibit-
ing the most miirked non- Aryan characteristics, and that the popular
belief which asserted them to be merely Sinhalese outcasts or per-
petually ostracised Kandyans, is entirely erroneous. Specimens ^ of
the crania of both classes further serve to show the resemblance of
typo between the two, and their divergence from the common forms
of Sinhalese and Tamil crania. Their more striking features can,
perhaps, be best indicated by the following measurements. The first
instance is that of a Bodiya who died in old age ; it is well authen-
ticated, the skull having been procured by the nephew of its original
owner. It is a well -filled skull and dolichocephalic, the cephalic index
being *71. Traces of the frontal suture still remain. The minimum

(1) Those arc now deposited in tho Museum at Oxford.

VOL. XX. N.S. Z Z

676

THE BOBITAS.

frontal width is 4 in.« and the maximum 4*8. The extreme length
is 7*4 ; vertical height, 5*7. The extreme breadth is 6*2 ; absolute
height, 6*5. The next is that of a Rodiya named Paksawadiya,
who had been, as was said, a medical man. In contour it resembles
the Tamil and other skulls of Mongolian races, but by measurement
it also is diown to be dolichocephalic. It has a sloping forehead,
and a somewhat abrupt parieto-occipital dip, and is slightly asym-
metrical, being flattened on the left parieto-occipital region. It is
deficient in cranial curvature, resting on the occipital condyles,
when the grinding surface of the teeth is placed in a horizontal
position. The cephalic index is *75, extreme length 6*7 in., and
extreme breadth 5*05 in. One of the Einnaraya skulls is that of an
extremely aged person, probably a woman, much absorption having
taken place in many parts. It is dolichocephalic, the cephalic
index *71, the maximum width being at the parietal tuberosities.
The extreme length is 7*1 in., vertical height 5*3 in. The extreme
breadth is 5* in. Another is of very much the same type, but
belonged to a younger subject. It is ridged along the vertex with
the maximum width at the parietal tuberosities, anteriorly to 'iirhich
it narrows very rapidly. It must have contained only a small
brain, and belonged to an owner who, though probably a male,
was of feeble muscular development. The cephalic index is *68,
extreme length 7 in., extreme breadth 4*8 in., and vertical height
5*1 in. The Einnarayas, or mat-weavers, like the Rodiyas, are of
an extremely low caste, but they have no recorded history of
their own, neither do they speak any other language than Sinhalese ;
they exhibit the one marked point of difference from the Eandyans,
that they never tie up their hair, whereby alone they are easily to
be distinguished from them. The question nf social precedence
between them and the Rodiyas is apparently still disputed, for they
have told me that whenever a Rodiya and a Einnaraya meet upon a
road, they simultaneously endeavour to take a position respectively
upon the top of an ant-hill or some other rising ground, and he who
first succeeds in effecting this remains there in triumph whilst his
pretentious rival passes by him upon lower ground. The Einna-
rayas are extremely few in number, and nothing is known of their
origin. They have every appearance of being a race distinct in
itself, and it is not unlikely that they are the remnant of a tribe of
more numerical and political importance in the early history of the
country. They are popularly supposed to be a branch of the
Sinhalese people, and the local tradition is contained in the follow-
ing account, which may perhaps be best given in the original form
in which it was detailed to me : — It is said that Einnaru first
einigrated from India to Oeylon, and that because they did not allow
their hair to grow in that country they still continue to observe the
same practice, and that th^ are a quite different race from the

IHB BOBIYAS.

m

Sinhalese. As an evidence of it^ it is known that both the males
and the females were not permitted from a remote period to use any
coyering for the head, according to a well-known ancient Sinhalese
poetical work called ^ Kaanchi-Eatawa/ that a prince who resided
in Eaanchi Nuwara, in Ceylon, went down to India, and there got
married to the daughter of a wealthy citizen called * Eurumudali,’ and
sometime afterwards he came back to Ceylon, and got married to a
princess royal; but that his former consort also came thither in
search of him, and presented herself before him, claiming him as her
husband, when a dialogue took place, and the princess royal ex-
claimed in derision, ^ 0 ! Einnara woman, have you also a husband P*
After a severe altercation between these two, the latter committed
suicide by tearing out her tongue, and her father, having heard of it,
prepared an armament, and came down to Ceylon to revenge the
affront offered to his daughter ; and that the old king, acting the
part of a politician, postponed the hearing of the matter from time
to time, till they became permanent residents of the place, and
during this time, for their maintenance, they began to weave mats
of different kinds of cords. And when the king was informed of it
he allotted them lands to live in, and to go on with their trade. As
they presented themselves at first before the king with their heads
uncovered, because of their grief, so they also continued it as a^
practice afterwards. In appearance and some other traits of charac-
ter they resemble the Sinhalese for the most part, but they are
addicted to slovenly habits. They neither bathe frequently nor
anoint their heads, and their dwellings are very small and imclean,
and they would not learn letters.” Such, then, is the tradition of
the native people as they express it themselves.

The customs observed by the various communities of Bodiyas, so
far as I have learned from my inquiries from representatives of the
race in the different parts of the country which they inhabit, are
identical in all their particulars, notwithstanding the considerable
distance which usually separates each kuppayama or sept from the
others, and the rarity of intercourse and communication between
them. In religion they are Buddhists and devil- worshippers, but they
are not admitted within the Buddhist temples. In accordance with
the common custom of the Sinhalese, they resort to the practice of
devil-worship in cases of illness, but the formula which they observe
is strange and peculiar to themselves. A suitable place is prepared
in the jungle, where a kind of altar is erected, the surface of which
is made flat, and covered with the bark of plantain-trees. It is then
scented with a sort of hard gum called dummala, and cooked vege-
tables arranged on a plantain-leaf are laid upon it. To this is added
rice and flowers, and the blood of a red cock — ^which is considered to
be of peculiar propitiatory efficacy, the blood of a hen or of a cock

sz2

678

THE EOBITAS.

of any different colour being deemed to have no value whatever for
this puiipose. The Eattadiya, or devil dancer, then recites a charm
or song, and the cure of the sick person is supposed to be complete.
The substance of the sacrifice is left to be eaten by birds or other
animals. The devils who are in this way invoked for the cure
of disease or illness, are of two sorts, being respectively known
as the Gerre and the Moleyi devils, and this sacrifice is not
unfrequently offered to them, for the Bodiyas have no system
of medicine. The name is given to a child by its parents seven
months after its birth, and if it can be afforded a feast is given
in honour of the day. Their marriages are unattended with any
peculiar ceremonies, polygamy, as well as polyandry, being not un-
common amongst them, and the character of the women is univer-
sally known to be immoral and disreputable. The Bodiyas do not,
however, marry their sisters or their daughters, as is the case
amongst the Weddas ; and I have been assured by them that a man
would consider it improper to remain even in his own house alone
with his sister. They are supposed to be very skilful in fortune
telling, but they probably practise the art merely as a cloak for
begging. I have also seen their women attempting to walk on a
kind of tight-rope, balancing a large brazen pitcher of water upon
their heads, but without any very conspicuous degree of success.
They boast of this nevertheless as one of their hereditary accomplish-
ments, as well as of the art of spinning a large brass plate upon the
tip of one of their fingers, a performance in which they display con-
siderable dexterity. Until late years the Bodiyas are said to have
used bows and arrows like the Weddas, but there is no trace
amongst them at the present day of the use of such weapons, and in
most of their habits of life they are gradually becoming assimilated
to the Sinhalese. The feeling of the people, however, is too in-
tolerant to admit their children to any participation in the benefits
of education, such as is provided in the government ikihools.
Their ignorance, therefore, is extreme ; they are unacquainted
with letters, and can rarely count above fifty — ^thus, when-
ever they desire to express the idea of a higher number than
this, they repeat the word for fifty, twice or oftener according
to the need of the case. There is no restriction now placed
upon them in the manner of their dress, except that, observing
the custom which long usage has established for them, they refrain
from tying a handkerchief upon their heads. They are allowed
to go from place to place along the regular roads like other people,
to cultivate what land they please, and to possess any kind of
domesticated animal. Their cattle also have been released from the
. necessity of wearing a cocoa-nut shell hung round their necks by a
vstrip of hide, as an invidious emblem of distinction, and are now per-
mitted to have their peculiar brand jxiarks.

THE BOBIYAS.

679

The ancient funeral customs of the Bodiyas seem to have been
still preserved without any alteration. The dead body having
been first washed is rubbed with oil. It is then laid flat and
wrapped in a mat^ or placed in a coffin if one can bo afforded, and
in this case the clothes of the deceased, with a chuman box, an
areca nut-cutter, some bangles, some rings, and some money, are
buried together with him. This is done, they say, because it is
their custom, and because these articles will be profitable to the
soul of the deceased person. After an interval of either seven
days or fifteen days, or one month, the friends and relations of
the deceased meet together in his house at a feast which is provided
in his honour by the survivors of his family. The language of the
Eodiyas is entirely distinctive and peculiar. The vocabulary which
I have myself compiled, with as much accuracy as was possible, and
after comparison of the colloquial dialects used in the several parts
of the country, may, I think, be fairly taken to bo an exhaustive list
of the words with which at the present time they communicate with
each other. It comprises, including proper names, and those of their
dogs, which are not permitted to share in the nomenclature of the
dogs of the Sinhalese people, between three and four hundred words,
and I have no doubt that it was formerly more extensive than it is
now, for many reasons have already been adduced to account for its
decay and disuse. It is much to be regretted that no attempt had
ever previously been made to record and preserve this remarkable
language ; it has been rapidly dying out for several years, and there
is no Rodiya probably nowadays who is not thoroughly conversant
with Sinhalese. I should, however, not omit to mention that
Mr. Gasie Chetty has given a list of rather more than one hundred
of their words in his paper, to which I have previously referred ; but
many of these are unfortunately misprinted, and, judged by their
English equivalents, some are decidedly wrong. It is astonishing
how much ignorance and indifference has prevailed regarding this
Bodiya language. One of the great Kandyan chiefs, a man of con-
siderable intelligence and power of observation, who had lived within
two miles of a largo community of Bodiyas for thirty years or more,
declared to me that he was not aware that they had any kind of
language of their own, until I told him so ; and to the majority of
the natives who live in their vicinity, the words which they habitu-
ally use, as well as the mere fact that they possess a separate voca-
bulary, are equally unknown or ignored. Their language possesses
no written characters or alphabet of its own, nor are there at the
present time any words in it for the numerals, the Sinhalese equiva-
lents being used, but the greater part of the words of which it is com-
posed are of uncertain origin. They are not, like most of the words
of the Wedda dialect, referable to old Sinhalese, nor to Sanskrit or
Dravidian roots, and I am not aware of any Indian language to

680

THE BODIYAS.

wUch the Bodiya bears the least similarity. The few traces of gram*
matical straoture which may be observed in the formation of the verbs,
are clearly of late growth, and have been engrafted on the original
roots from the Sinhalese forms. They invariably have the termina-
tion nawa in the present tense, although the root of the word
is wholly unconnected mth Sinhalese ; as, for instance, the word
signifying die,” which is “Likwenawa,” with a past participle,
** Likwechcha,” a dead person being called Likwechcha palla.”

It is worthy of remark that in some few instances the words which
are used to express particular ideas in one part of the country, are
entirely different from the words which denote the similar ideas in
another part. A cat, for instance, is called by the Bodiyas of £ot-
male — himbussa,” while those who live in Dumbara know it only
by the name ^‘buhakawanna”; gigiria,” which in Kotmale means a
b^on, in Dumbara, signifies the sun ; “ rabbota ” is the word in the
latter district for a book, whilst in the former it is ^^ilakkan galuwa.”
The word for hungry in the district of Uwa is “ ninbaruwan,” but in
the other parts of the island it is peggiritten.” The occurrence of
long compound words is not unfrequent, as, for instance, the word
signifying a pestle and mortar, atulukkanamatilla, lukkanawa,”
meaning I beat. A hoe or mammoty, bintalawweterikaronanaduwa.”
There are no songs or charms peculiar to the language, and however
scanty and poor it may seem to be, it nevertheless sulSces wholly for
nU the practical requirements of the intercourse of the Bodiyas with
each other. Mr. Casie Chetty was inclined to think that it exhi-
bited the relics of a language which was spoken by the ancestors of
the Bodiyas, and since merged into the Sinhalese, and not a mere
collection of slang as others supposed. Mr. L. de Zoysa Mudalizar,
whose opinion upon a matter of this nature is of much value, was
inclined to the belief that it was an artificial jargon invented by
some one, and not the remains of a primitive language, the words, so
far as he knew and remembered them, being neither of* Aryan nor
Dravidian origin, nor, indeed, resembling the vocabulary of any other
nation he could think of. Other eminent Sinhalese scholars, however,
whom I have had the advantage of consulting upon the subject, have
thought that the language is one which has always been peculiar to
the Bodiyas, and also that as such it goes far to prove them to be
a race of people distinct in themselves from the Sinhalese. The
balance of probability certainly appears to me to favour this latter
view, eqpecially when the circumstances under which it has been
perpetuated, and the state in which we now find it, are taken into
consideration ; but the origin, development, and afiBnities of a
language which possesses no literature, and is in one of the last stages
of 4eeay, is one of those problems which, however interesting it
may he, will, nevertheless, probably remain unsolved for ever.

Bebtbam F. Hartbhobke.

HOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

The storm, which for eighteen months past has been gathering in the
East and every day becoming more threatening, appears to be on the eve of
bursting. War between Turkey and Russia will be avoided only with
extreme difficulty. While these lines are being written, English diplo-
macy is making a last effort to prevent a collision which may bring about
an overturning of all Europe. Will it succeed ? It is difficult to say.

The manifestations in favour of the Bulgarians have had two excel-
lent results. In the first place they have proved once more to Europe
that the English were ready to defend the sufferers from oppression;
and, in the second place, they have led the English Cabinet to assume
an attitude more in accordance with the real interests of England. Lord
Derby, in a dispatch which has received unanimous approbation, has
asked, through Sir H. Elliot, that complete reparation should be
made to the wretched l^ulgarians and their families, the exemplary
punishment of the monsters who presided at the massacres, and, above
all, institutions of a nature to prevent the renewal of similar atrocities.
There is no foundation in the pretence that the manifestations in favour of
the Bulgarians have had the effect of stimulating Russia to take up a more
hostile attitude with regard to the Porte. It is quite clear that Russia’s
plans have been matured from the first, and that, secure of the support of
Germany, she has always wished the autonomy of Bosnia, Herzegovina,,
and Bulgaria. Under the pressure of public opinion the Cabinet has formu-
lated a programme of reforms, which has had the good fortune of gaining the
adhesion of Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and even Austria. The Porte,,
instead of accepting these reforms with alacrity, has hesitated, and, without
quite rejecting them, has offered general reforms applicable to the whole em-
pire. Turkey was to be transformed into a constitutional state. There was*
to be at Constantinople a chamber of duputies and a senate, composed in equal
numbers of Christians and Moslems. All were to be treated with justice,
gentleness, and consideration. The Turkish Government itself declares
that if it had the appearance of yielding directly to the demands of the
Powers, it would provoke an uprising which might cost the lives of the
foreign residents and even of the ministers themselves. But is not such a
pretext for refusing the English proposals the most crushing condemnation
of the Government which uses it ? If the Turkish Government has not
sufficient authority to make its subjects receive the reforms suggested by a
friendly power, how can we for a moment believe that the promises now
made by the Divan will ever be performed ? Good-will may not wholly be
wanting, it is real power and the means of practical realisation. The Porte
is in a position out of which there is no issue. To defend itself it must
appeal to Mussulman feeling in its most intense and excited form, it must
employ as its agents the most fanatical and barbarous of its subjects, and
at ^e same it must grant to the despised and abhorred Christians the same

682 home A2SCD rOBEIGN APFAIBS*

privileges as to the tme believers. It is like asking the familiars of the
Inquisition to carry out an edict of toleration. In other words, it is to ask
for the impossible. One may say of the Turks as of the Jesuits, Sint ut
Bunt]fiut non sint. The radical reforms proposed by Turkey have not been
taken seriously by any Power. They have been regarded as a dead letter,
and the governments most favourable to Turkey have regretted that she did
not at once accept the English proposals. << It was a fault on her part," is
generally said. No doubt of it. But could she help committing it ?

Diplomatists have been profuse in schemes more or less sincerely
designed to bring about an agreement. Russia adopted tho English
proposal of an armistice of six weeks, to which Turkey replied by offering
one of six months. Evidently fearing a plot to deceive her, and convinced
that no concessions will disarm her enemies, she refuses to modify her terms.

Thus we have come to point at which a collision seems nearly inevitable.
Evidently, not because an understanding cannot be come to on the question
whether the armistice is to last six weeks or six months. A compromise
would be the easiest matter in the world. Tho danger comes from the fact
that there is evidently a foregone intention to appeal to tho sword. Pre-
parations for war are announced on all sides. Corps of Cossacks several
thousand strong are crossing Roumania in the direction of Alexinatz.
These are not single volunteers but regular companies, under pretext of
Autumn manoeuvres. The reserves of the Roumanian army have been
called up, and a treaty it is said has been concluded with the railways for
the transport of two hundred and fifty thousand men with their arms and
baggage. Russia is concentrating imposing forces in tho south of her
Empire and beyond the Caucasus. The warlike spirit has spread to Greece,
where tho newspapers talk of delivering their brethren of the neighbouring
provinces, oppressed by tho Turks. M. Comoundoros has explained to the
Parliament that the Greek nation ought to make the necessary preparations,
so that it might be ready to meet all emergencies. The army is to be
reorganized, the old loans settled, and a new one of ten millions of
drachmas made, of which one million would go for immediate armaments.
The minister ended his discourse in language which implies that in the
event of Turkey being dismembered, Greece intends to have her share.
England is reinforcing her fleet in the Mediterranean, and sends her best
generals to Gibraltar and Malta. All tho Exchanges are in a state of panic
and the funds falling.

Let US now attempt to penetrate to the bottom of this involved situation,
and discover what will come of it. It must be by this time clear to every-
body that Russia is determined to intervene in Turkey, either with or with-
out the consent of England and Austria. Even were the question of the
armistice settled, the further question of the guarantees offered by Turkey
would be a stumbling-block. Consider Lord Derby's programme of serious
reforms — a sort of administrative autonomy and equality to the Christians.
Any one who knows Turkey will know that she never will be able to
realise such radical reforms as these. Nothing but foreign intervention
could carry them through. This cannot be seriously denied. In any case
Russia will be sure to maintain this view, and use it as a pretext to justify

HOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

683

her intervention. If the insurrection in Bosnia has maintaihod itself, if
Montenegro and Servia have declared war, if Boumania has claimed, or
rather proclaimed, her independeuce, and if Greece in her turn rises, it is
because they feel themselves supported by Russia : and if Russia has kept
unflinchingly to a policy so decided, which one day must place her face to
face with England and Austria, the reason is that she was sure of the sup-
port of Germany. It is as clear as day that Russia would never have
advanced as she has if she had feared that she would have Germany
against her. When the Times lately adjured Prince Bismarck to stop
Russia, informing him that the intorosts of Germany (which possibly he
knew as well as his Mentor) would not allow the Danube to become a
Russian stream, that great journal threw away its pains. From the be-
ginning of the insurrections in Herzegovina, Prince Bismarck has been quite
aware of what would come out of them. He has met frequently this
summer Prince GortschakojQT ; the Emperor William has had long con-
ferences with his nephew of Russia, and even lately sent to him General
Manteufiel on a confidential mission. If, then. Prince Bismarck has not
pronounced his veto, it is because he does not mean to do so. Rather, he
has stimulated Russia to act, as each time that intimate communications
have taken place between St. Petersburg and Berlin, the action of Russia
has been more decided.

There can in fact be no doubt that Russia and Germany are working
together at the present moment. It is for this reason that Austria allows
herself to be led into a lino of conduct that suits her not at all. If she
thought that she could roly on Germany, she would long ago have resisted
Russia to the face. Now she is reduced to a passive attitude, and even to take
part in a policy distasteful to her rulers. If Germany and Russia were to
agree to attack her, she would have feeble means of resistance, and even if
England were willing to come to her help, could England do so effectually ?
What force could Great Britain lead into the heart of Europe, and what
serious injury could she inflict on Russia, especially when the ice has closed
up the Gulph of Finland ? The only efficacious ally which Austria could
find would bo France, by the latter attacking Germany on her flank, while
the forces of the latter were engaged in Bohemia, or in the centre of
Germany. But France appears to be decided on observing an absolute
neutrality, whatever happens. There is an official note published in the
Agence Havas. All that has been said for some days concerning alliances
and engagements taking in regard to a possible war, is absolutely false.
France is exclusively and resolutely devoted to the work of domestic re-
organization, and will not allow herself to be seduced from her retirement.”
And the organ of M. Gambetta uses identical language.

Austria knows therefore well enough that she cannot reckon on France.
The latter knows also that she cannot even indirectly venture to oppose
Germany without being at once attacked by the latter, who evidently seeks
a pretext to resume her designs of the Spring of 1875. Austria is at the
present moment in a state of isolation and is forced to follow the lead of
Russia, and she will allow the latter to occupy Bulgaria without drawing
the sword. We said it six months ago, and we repeat it now, Austria

684

BOME ABB FOBEIGB APFAIB&

would have done better for her own interests had she in the first instance
]^aced herself at the head of the Slavonic and anti-Turkish movement, in
accepting the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina or even in occupying
those provinces. The Magyars do not desire any increase of the Slave
element in the empire, but they are struggling against the nature of things
and the march of history. The Slaves are in a migority in the Empire
Austria-Hungary, which sooner or later must become a second Sclavonic
empire or disappear. Its centre of attraction will for the future be Pesth.
Its course is well marked out, it is to advance towards .the Black Sea and
the Balkan, and thus effect a counterpoise to Bussia. If Austria refuses
she will be crashed between her two powerful neighbours.

The actual object of Russia is probably therefore to set up in the Turkish
provinces little independent principalities, like Servia, under her protectorate,
and even to enlarge Greece if the latter succeeds in acquiring a part of the
neighbouring territory. Is this a result to be deplored? In no wise.
Sooner or later it is inevitable, and of all solutions it is the best. It has
succeeded well in Boumania and Servia. In Bulgaria and Bosnia the diffi-
culty is greater, because of the larger Mohammedan population. But a
Christian prince with a few troops could very well maintain order there.
Such little states connected by a federal link would have no wish to let
themselves be absorbed by the Muscovite giant — whose yoke is not so
pleasant to bear. This is besides the sole possible issue. Aether we like
it or not we must accept it.

In this connection we are forced to ask, what are the views of the Sphynx
of Tarsin ? Nobody knows them, and the most out-spoken of statesmen
has, on this occasion, kept a stern silence. Prince Bismarck lately said to
a diplomatist who was talking to him on Eastern affairs, ‘‘Isee plainly
what is the interest of Russia and of Austria. I do not see what is the
interest of Germany. If you can tell me I should be much indebted to
you.” The curtain is drawn in front of plans which are wished to be
concealed. Obviously the very destiny of Germany is at stake in this
Eastern crisis. Let us try and see behind the curtain if possible.

Germany had decided on a war with France in the spring of 1875»
under the pretext that the armaments of the latter threatened her
security. Why did Prince Bismarck expose his country to intoler-
able odium which could not fail to attach to an unprovoked attack
on a country which only wanted peace to heal her recent and
cruel wounds? History shows us that great changes in the relative
size and influence of Stotes, have never taken place without protracted
wars, and there is little probability that a war of six months' duration would
suffice to turn little Prussia into a powerful empire, dominating all Europe.
Sooner or later, an alliance between Russia, France, and Austria is a con-
tingency almost certam. This is the peril which threatens Germany. How
is tt to be avoided ? Evidently by attacking sin^y one by one the future
enemies nnd allies before they have time to come to an agreement of mutual
. The first blow was to be aimed at France. We all know how
tbeBi^paror Alexander put a stop to this scheme. But it was an object of
the higbest importance to Prince Bismarck tp repair the fault he had com?

HOME AND POEEIGH AEFAIBS.

m

mitted of prematnrdy showing his hand, and how was he to do this ? By
enticing Bnssia into the Eastern embroglio, so that she should of her own
will be ready to do in 1876 what she had refused the year before. The
insurrections in Herzegovina and Bosnia which led to the Andrassy Note,
then the Berlin Memorandum, the war begun by Servia, the at first dis-
guised and then open intervention of Russia — all this series of events con-
tributed to the desired opportunity. Let a collision result from them be-
tween Russia and Austria, and Prince Bismarck has his hands as free as
they were eighteen months ago. Eastern affairs have avenged him of the
check he received in 1875. He is now the arbiter of Europe. Russia
with her hands full in the East has now need of his help. V^at will he
make of his tremendous power ?

He may content himself with a Platonic support of Russia, and have
the satisfaction of saying that he is paying his debts of 1870 ; watch her
involve herself in all the difficulties of an expedition or of a conquest
beyond the Lower Danube. Will he act thus ? It is not probable, as
such a course would offer small future security to Germany. Or ho may
resume his plans of 1875, and again attack France, extort more milliards,
and annex more provinces. But the milliards have impoverished Germany
instead of enriching her, and the annexation of more territory idien in
tongue and against geographical convenience would be absurd. Let us
bear in mind that France cannot be killed because of her unity. But that
is not true of Austria, and here we have a third possibility. As she is
composed of three different nationalities, she is susceptible of a definitive
partition. The German provinces, and even Bohemian, would be rapidly
absorbed in the Prussian Empire, of which Hungary would be an inevitable
dependency. In return, Russia might temporarily take Galicia, Roumania,
and what she could in Turkey. Thus Germany, aggrandised by nearly the
whole of Austria, would be in a position at a future date to resist even a
Franco-Russian alliance. Lastly, we may conceive a fourth line of action
which would imply certainly more courage than honesty in Prince Bismarck^
and that is, to suppose he means to profit by Russia’s embarrassments, to
reinstate a grand Poland as a bulwark against the northern giant.

On weighing all these contingencies one is forced to regard the ab-
sorption of the Austrian Empire as offering the best chance to Germany
of escaping the dangers which the future is certain to prepare for her.
As soon as Germany is guaranteed against the danger of a Russian, French,
and Austrian coalition, the motives which actuated Prince Bismarck in his
designs on France in 1875 will have ceased to operate.

However we look at it the future is very dismal. The war .may perchance
be localized and nothing but the autonomy of the Turkish Provinces be the
result. But in that case how would Germany be paid for her support of
Russia ? On the other hand the war may spread, and a general recon-
struction of the map of Europe be effected after frightful struggles.
Beside the tremendous problems presented by Eastern affiiirs, the rest of
European politics offer but slight interest. The recent partial elections to
the Chamber in France, however, are not without significance. They have
shown once more that the straggle for the future lies between the Repub-

688 HOME AXD FOBEIOK AFFAIBS.

licans and tbe Bonapartistfi. 'Wherever the latter meet a Legitimist or a
Moderate Monarchist they win the day. The partisans of Monarchy,
therefore, ought either to renounce their political ideal and become con-
verts to the Bepublic, or elso vote and act with the adherents of the
Empire which they attacked so violently but the other day. French Con-
servatives are reduced to choose between a frank acceptance of republican
institutions, which they moderate while they maintain them, and a return
of the Empire with all its dangers and shame. This situation cannot fail to
fortify the Bepublic, but only on the condition that the extreme does not
frighten the country. The electoral contest in Italy does not promise to be
very animated, and the ministry is sure of an easy victory. The dis-
tinguished leader of the opposition has declared that in the present position
of affairs his party was too remote from office to be called upon to trace
a political programme.

The exact state of English public opinion on the Eastern question at this
time may well be an almost inscrutable problem for foreign observers, and
even home critics are not unlikely to misinterpret its signs. There is a
comparative lull in the active agitation of a few weeks ago, and there is a
distinct change in the attitude of a portion of the London press, which
unfortunately is too often assumed to represent national sentiment, when
it only interprets the particular opinions current at the London clubs, and
among the few hundred superior persons who think and write on these
matters for the rest oi London.

A short time back the Times allowed itself to be carried away by the
universal indignation, and was as strongly anti-Turkish as the D(nhj News
itself. Now it is so intensely anti-Eussian as to have lost its keener sense
of Turkish atrocities in its more recent fear of Bussian aggression. Which
is the truer expression of the national mood, or are both the accurate
representation of the changing phases of popular opinion and the successive
humours of an inconstant multitude ?

Let us examine the facts more closely. Two definite conclusions result
from every meeting, and from every speech on the popular side during
the recent agitation : one, that the English people will never* again grant its
support to prop the failing empire of the Turks ; the other that they desire
that the whole influence of England shall be used to prevent the possibility
of a repetition of the outrages which have filled their minds with horror
and indignation.

There is not the slightest reason for supposing that the nation has
swerved one jot from either of these conclusions. The speech of Lord
Beaconsfield at Aylesbury was accepted as a defiance of popular opinion
and a denial of the popular demands ; and had the matter rested there,
.the storm would have soon gathered to a head. But the speeches of the
OhaneeUor of the Exchequer at Wakefield, and of Lord Derby to the
deputation from the Guifdhall, though unsatisfactory and indefinite, were
stffl, conceived in a totally different spirit to the after-dinner display of
the Mine Minister, and they had the effect of transforming the discussion
from one abont principles into one about details.

HOHE AED FOREIGN AFFAIRS. 697

Mach was hoped i^m the opportunity afforded to Mr. Bright at Man-
chester (September 27), but nnfortanately the great orator was more mtent
on proving that the vast majority of his countrymen were wrong in 1854,
than in encouraging them to persist in right in 1876. Mr. Bright is unable
to see that there is any difference in the cases, and he almost insists on
extorting a confession of error and an apology from those who differed from
him twenty years ago, before he will allow them to agree with him in the
present crisis.

There is reason to fear that the effect of the speech has been bad, and
instead of convincing every one that we were wrong in the Crimean War,
it has made some Liberals doubt whether they may not have been prema-
ture in their present altered views.

The general result is that a period of agitation has given place to a period
of expectation. Keen foreign politicians, and students who have closely
followed these transactions from the ffrst, see clearly that the policy of
Lord Derby, as disclosed in the correspondence presented to Parliament,
and more obscurely hinted at in his speeches, is diametrically opposed to
the results which the Nation has so imperatively demanded ; and they may
be excused if they infer from the silence of the public, that their desire for
these results has become less anxious, and that the objects so clamorously
sought for a short time ago are already fading from their minds. Such
an inference would, however, be incorrect. The national vrill is set as
strongly as ever, the object sought is the same, and the new direction
which has been given to our Eastern policy will be maintained. But the
political atmosphere is hazy, and the straight course is not clearly in view.
When the clouds lift and the way is known, if the English nation finds that
it has been betrayed into a falso position by its so-called statesmen, there
will bo a new revelation of popular feeling, as startling to tho politicians of
Pall Moll as the one which they are now engaged in forgetting; and
whose significance they have only partially appreciated.

What are the probabilities of such an event ? We are compelled to con-
fess ourselves as much in the dark as any. Tory policy has already been
modified : it may bo entirely changed in accordance with the national will.
Tory government exists always on sufferance, and so long only as its
members are content to carry out a moderately liberal policy. It is per-
mitted td them to hold Conservative opinions but not to give them effect.

At the commencement of the insurrection in the Herzegovina, it is
perfectly clear what those opinions were. The Conservative ministry
consistently desired to preserve the status quo, serenely indifferent to the
proof which was showered upon them that the existing government of the
Turks was for all its Christian subjects a state of intolerable tyranny,
oppression and insult, varied by occasional outbursts of exceptionid
fanaticism and outrage. Lord Derby’s indignant displeasure with those
who would disturb this normal condition of brutal violence and wrong is
very instructive. His expressed epinion has beeu that the insurrection must
bo put down as a preliminary to negotiations, and every diplomatic effort
has been exhausted to convince tho Powers of tho propriety of allowing the
Suzerain to crush his ungrateful subjects. The Bulgarian massacres W6re
a stroke of ill-luck for which Lord Derby must owe a grudge to Providence.

688

H03CE AND F0BSI6K AFFAOEtS.

• The Turks too literally aceq>ted his advice to jpt dovm insuxreotion,
and proceeded in a rough and ready fashion vrith none of those refinements
which the Foreign Secretory would no doubt have sjaggested, had he been
consulted about the details. This indiscretion on the part of our amiable
aHy upset all calculations. It has distinctly forced the hand of diplomacy
and entirely changed the situation.

Now, all are agreed, in words at any rate, that security must be taken
against the possibility of such another shock to the conscienee of Europe as
is involved in putting down an insurrection in the nineteenth century, and
in the presence of newspaper coirespondents, as it might have been put
down, without observation, some few hundreds, of years ago. And not only
80, but all are also enlightened by these events as to the true nature and
character of Turkish rule, under which it has been possible for men to
commit these crimes, and to receive honour and reward for their villainy.
Everything now turns, therefore, on the nature of the securities to be
demanded. And here the Government seems to have thought most of
sparing the feelings of the Porte, while the English people have been chiefly
concerned to protect the lives and the honour of those who have the misfor-
tune to be its subjects.

Omitting all details, two suggestions stand out prominently for the settle-
ment of the question. The first involves the concession of certain privileges
to the Christians by the Sultan, and especially of some kind of purely local
self-government, with a right reserved to the Great Powers to secure the
execution of the promised reforms.

This has been supported less on its own merits, than by arguments tend-
ing to show that all other alternatives are impracticable. The most
important contribution in its favour has been made by Mr. Forster, in
whose laboured speech at Bradford it is impossible not to recognise all the
characteristic qualities of the statesman to whom we owe the education
compromise of 1870 , and the subsequent disruption and defeat of the
Liberal party. Once more he stands apart from the principal members of
his party, and speaking from a Badical pulpit preaches Conservative
doctrine. We cannot but admit the gravity of this new defection, and regret
the complications to which it may give rise. There was some hope that we
might have seen the last of Mr. Forster’s compromises ; but it appears that
the old Adam has not yet been expelled, and that Mrl Forster will still seek
safety in a middle course, and find his reward in the applause of the Con-
servative party.

If,” says the right hon. member for Bradford, ** Lord Derby is, as I
trust he is, on behalf of the Government, pressing for this joint action ” (is.
action by the six Powers to compel the Sultan to give them what Mr. Forster
calls a treaty right to share in the government of his subjects), ** I hope the
country wiU support him in it, and that we shall have no party feeling, and
BO attempt to prevent him having that support of the people of England
winch the Government ought to have in every foreign question of this
moment.”

The six Powers have already been unable to agree even on a definition
of loed seltgovemment, and it is eai^ to see how illusory is the hope of

HOME AEB FOEBION AF7AIBS.

689

anj floaeert between their re^nresentatiFes if they were charged with the
execution of a sericB of complicated reforms. Bat besides this, there is a
fatal objection to Mr. Forster's proposal — ^namely, that either the reforms
promised will be inadequate, and the subjects of the Porte will be again
handed over to the tender mercies of their tyrants, or, if the reforms are
sufficient for the security of the Christian population, they will be as stoutly
resisted on behalf of the Sultan as the proposals of Mr. Gladstone himself;
and the pressure which would be necessary to carry them would be more
than sufficient to secure the independence of the oppressed provinces. For
Mr. Forster's plan supposes an interference with the Turkish Government
throughout the whole of the empire, and amounts to little less than treat-
ing the Saltan as a minor, and instituting a joint regency of the six Powers.
Mr. Gladstone is at once more moderate and more wise ; and seeing that
the disruption of the empire, though gradual, is certain, he is content to
deal with the circumstances as they arise, but on principles which may be
applied to every subsequent convulsion. To say, as Mr. Forster appears
inclined to do, that the Christian populations are unfitted for self-govern-
ment, is only to repeat the stock argument of all opponents of liberty in
every time and country, falsified though it always has been by the experience
of freedom ; while the assumption that because a most bigoted and fanati-
cal minority has cruelly oppressed an unarmed majority, therefore this
majority will be unable to preserve order, when restored to its rights, and
placed in a position to defend itself, is unworthy of a man of Mr. Forster's
common sense, and shows that in his readiness to differ with Mr. Gladstone
he has not paused to select his reasons.

' It must not be forgotten, in considering Mr. Gladstone's position, that
his view has been generally adopted by Lord Stratford de Bedcliffe, whose
knowledge of the Turks and their subjects is not likely to betray him into
the support of impracticable schemes.

On the whole Mr. Gladstone's plan is clearly the one which has com-
mended itself to the majority of the English people, and if he could be
induced to place himself distinctly at the head of the movement for pro<-
moting its success, the agitation would gather new force and energy under
his direction, and all indistinctness of aim would disappear. It is worth
notice, in this connection, that Liberals as independent in their action as
Mr. Oowen at Newcastle, Mr. Peter Taylor at Brighton, Mr. Chamberlain
at Birmingham, and Mr, Potter at Bochdale, have agreed in urging Mr.
Gladstone to assume the leadership, and have expressed their belief that all
differences on less urgent questions should be at least postponed in favour
of united action in the present crisis.

It only remains to consider the attempt by a certain class of politicians to
arouse the old dread of Bussian aggression, and to secure pro-Turkish
action under cover of resistance to a Muscovite advance on Constantinople.'

None of these gentlemen have thought it necessary to prove, in set pro-
positions that, even if such an advance did occur, it would constitute a real
danger for this country ; nor have they attempted to show that such possible
danger might not be averted hy other means than a war with Bussia, in
defence of Turkish imbecility and cruelty. Neither has it been considered

690 lOHE Ain)> FOBEIGN AFFAIBS.

worth to examme the right, or the power of England, permanently to
axelnda the fleet of a great Power from the Mediterranean by treaty
parovisionB which mnet be felt as a standing insult and humiliation by a high-
spirited people. Yet if the peace of Europe depends on the perpetual
maintenance of such arbitrary restrictions, it ought to be evident that it
rests on very frail support, and it might be wiser to try at once to devise
some modus vieendi wi& greater promise of endurance. If foresight of this
hind may not be hoped for from our statesmen, at least it requires no special
training to grasp the fact that the very best barrier which we can erect
against the alleged ambition of Russia would be created by the frank accept-
ance of her offer to assist in fomung independent and possibly federated
states between her territories and the supposed objects of her policy : — and
in the friendly relations which we should cultivate with these states, estab-
lished by our assistance and with our concurrence, we should find a better
security for peace than in the alliance of a tottering and discredited empire.

On the whole it may safely be concluded that, notwithstanding, the
vacillations of a portion of the press, neither the conservative sympathies of
the Oovemment, nor the attempt to revive the old diplomatic traditions,
will be successful in changing the fixed determination of the miyority of the
English nation to recognise our responsibilities to the Christian populations
of the East, and to use all the influence of this country to secure their
virtual independence from the hateful tyranny by which ^ey have been so
long and so grievously oppressed.

If the Government had shared the sympathies of the nation, and h&ff
made the safety and welfare of the Christians a prominent object of their
policy from the first, they would have found themselves in accord with
Bnssia, and might have cheeked any idea of selfish aggrandisement on hor
part by taking joint action for the independence of the provinces.

In this direction lay the best hopes of avoiding an European war, and
not m obstinate adherence to the old traditions concerning the integrity of
the Ottoman Empire. But now that Russia is launched on a policy of
separate interference, it may well happen that her aims will be extended as
time goes on, and we shall then find that the selfish policy of our Govern-
ment has precipitated the result which they have been so anxious to avoid.

Oft. 26, 1876.

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW

No. CXX. New Sbeies.— Decembee 1,1876.

A VISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH NOTES ON SWEDISH
LICENSING.

I

None who have had experience of travel in Swedish Lapland are
likely to deny to it the charms of perfect freshness and originality.
The almost primitive character and habits of the people, the singular
conditions of their life, the unique splendour of the scenery, the
bright intoxication of the air, and the glory of the arctic sunsets, are
all a constant source of pleasure and surprise. For the angler there
is almost unlimited trout and grayling fishing, with possibilities of
salmon ; and for the sportsman abundance of ptarmigan, willow
grouse, hares, and wild fowl of all descriptions ; while the cost of
living, not indeed sumptuously, but sufiiciently well, may bo covered
by two or three shillings a day. Unfortunately these advantages
can only be reached by routes so little tempting to the ordinary
tourist that it appears from the visitors’ book at Quickjock that only
three hundred persons in twenty years have braved the discomforts
of the approach. Now, however, that Norway is becoming hackneyed
ground, and that all its available streams are rented and preserved,
it is possible that the attractions of Lapland may yet counterbalance
the well-founded objections to the Gulf of Bothnia. At the present
time the trip cannot be recommended to ladies, unless they are
willing to put up with more than the usual inconvenience and dis-
comfort of out-of-the-way travel ; but for men, willing to rough it
a little, there is no hardship or difficulty greater than those with
which most sportsmen must be already familiar.

Stockholm, the starling point of the expedition, may be reached
direct by Hull and Gothenburg ; or, if the land route be preferred,
through Calais, Cologne, and Hamburg, and thence, either through
Jutland to Friedrickshavn, and across the Cattegat to Gothenburg,
or by Kiel and Eorsoer to Copenhagen, and thence by Malmo to
Stockholm. For bad sailors the last route is t6 be preferred, as in
VOL. XX. N.S. 3 A

692

A VISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH

the other oases the traveller must make the acquaintance of either
the Skaggerack or the Cattegat, or of both ; and he will probably
find that their names are not rougher than their waters, and that
they are in fact the most diabolical cross-seas on the face of the
globe. The captain of the little steamer which plies between
Gothenbiirg and Friedrickshavn, who has spent the greater portion of
his life in ocean ships, informed us that he never dared to go below
when the Cattegat was rough, but found his only safety from sickness
in the fresh breeze on deck.

The distinctive beauty of Stockholm is in its situation. Built
partly on islands in Lake Malar, it is intersected in every direction
by the waters of the lake and of the Baltic, and with its busy quays,
broad streets, handsome buildings, pleasant gardens, and clear
atmosphere, is certainly one of the brightest and most charming
capitals in Europe. The streets arc still enlivened by the gay
costumes of the peasants, especially those of the nearest provinces ;
it is said, however, that their use is gradually dying out before the
advance of railroads and other enemies of the picturesque.

The Swedes are undoubtedly a fine race ; many of the men aro
very tall, and the women are almost universally refined-looking and
graceful in their carriage. A crowd of Swedes might at any time
be mistaken by an Englishman for a crowd of the better sort in his
own country ; and in character there is the same resemblance to a
high average English standard. The middle and trading classes
have great sympathy with the English nation and its institutions,
and are ready at all times to express and prove it ; the aristocracy
and higher ranks of society are more inclined to favour French
manners and customs, but this is due to the influence of the Court
and to the origin of the lioyal Family. Every educated Swede
reads and probably speaks English well, and with very slight, if any,
foreign accent. English newspapers and books of all kinds are
largely read, and English literature is a prominent branc}]^ of study
at the high or middle-class schools, of which, as of all other educa-
tional institutions, there is an ample supply in Sweden. All along
the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, in every little town of a few
hundred, or at most of two or three thousand, inhabitants, there is a
large school of this description, with a full staff of masters, lektors,
and assistants, provided according to a fixed scale, and forming part
of the general organisation for national instruction. We met several
of these teachers, and found them extremely well informed and
intelligent men, speaking English, French, and German, and accept-
ing^ for the communication of these acquirements salaries which
would be deemed totally inadequate in any other and richer country.
They were all home-taught, by books and not voce, and hence,
thoagH well qualified to translate English into Swedish, they found

NOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

it more difficult to reverse the process and to interpret their thoughts
into elegant English. *‘The weather is deplorable/’ said one of
these gentlemen; ^'it makes for the melancholy, and influences on
the humours.’^

The fees charged in the schools are moderate, and such as to
induce a general acceptance of the educational advantages oflered by
the class for whom they are intended. Primary education in Sweden
is free and compulsory, though it is seldom necessary to recur to the
interference of the magistrates. The Swedes cannot be mode to
understand the beauty of our English system, by which a national
service, undertaken on the distinct ground of its importance to the
whole community, is made unpopular by a charge extorted from the
persons whose ready and voluntary acceptance of the service is the
object desired. They argue that the State, as a whole, is bound
to secure to all its citizens the opportunity of acquiring at least the
elementary knowledge which is requisite for its security and general
well-being, and that it is the function of the State to offer this
instruction free of charge before it attempts to compel any individual
to avail himself of it. They attribute the almost universal prevalence
of primary instruction in their country to the existence of these free
schools, and point to their wide popularity as sufficient evidence of
the fallacy of the proposition, so often taken for granted in England,
that the poor do not value education which is paid for out of the
general taxation of the community.

Steamers leave Stockholm for lluparanda, at the head of the Gulf
of Bothnia, two or three times a week, colling on the way at the
ports on the west coast. Against a head-wind these boats roll and
pitch in an extremely provoking fashion ; but dui'ing the summer
months the voyage is generally a smooth one. The boats carry
stores to the towns on the route and bring back tar, which, with
wood, and iron from the mines of the great Gellivara Company —
now the sole property of an English merchant — constitute the chief
trade of the gulf. The coast navigation is extremely intricate and
difficult, the steamer winding its way for hours through the fiords and
among innumerable rocky islets. On one occasion we bumped over
a sunken rock, and, if one may judge by the composure of the
captain, this must be no infrequent occurrence, though it smashed
all the crockery laid out in the saloon and greatly alarmed the
passengers. At night, and on the occasion of a fog, progress is
impossible, and the steamer is brought to and anchored till daylight
or clear weather.

Our destination was Lulea, which is reached in about seventy-two
hours from Stockholm, and is a town of some two thousand inhabit-
ants, situated at the mouth of the great river of the some name. The
harbour, after the difficulties of the entrance are surmounted, is a fine.

3 A 2

694

A VISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH

one, and many English and other ships lie here, loading timber ;
it is floated down the river from the forests, and cut into planks or
made up into frames for doors and windows at the saw-mills in the
town and neighbourhood.

The houses are almost entirely built of wood, and are in many
cases shops and warehouses as well as dwelling-houses, although
there is little display of goods in the windows. There is a large
school, attended by the youths from all the surrounding district, as
well as by thoso resident in the town itself. Lulea is the seat of the
government of the province of Norbotten, which includes the whole
of Lapland, and has a population of 80,000, scattered over 1,932
square miles of country. The governor, who has no sinecure, being
required to visit personally his immense district several times a year,
is provided with an official residence and a salary of 12,000 Swedish
crowns, or about £650 per annum.

On arriving at the inn, wrhich is good and clean, and makes up
some forty beds, one is struck with a peculiarity of all similar places
in Sweden, namely, the apparent indifference to visitors exhibited by
the proprietor. No head waiter, with attendant circle of porters
and chambermaids, awaits the arrival of the guest. Tho luggage is
put down at the entrance, and tho traveller must seek for himself
• his rooms and the information he requires ; while the landlord, with
his hands in his pockets, regards his efforts from a window with
languid curiosity. There is no intentional incivility, but it appears
not to be the custom to welcome the coming guest, although to speed
the parting guest there is abundance of hand-shaking and hearty
good wishes. The curious custom of the Smdrgos prevails at these
inns, and indeed everywhere throughout Sweden ; it consists in a
standing refreshment provided at a side table free of charge, and
comprising bread and butter, cheese, caviare, dried fish and rein-
deer flesh, sausages, and other similar delicacies, to be taken imme-
diately before each regular meal, and washed down with branvin
and other neat spirits. In connection with this performance the
Swedes have an objectionable habit, which may be called the com-
munity of forks, as tho same implement passes rapidly from mouth
to mouth and from dish to dish ; the rights of private property are
flagrantly disregarded.

From Lulea a succession of three small steamers, each making its
passage to the bottom of considerable rapids, carry the traveller
some ninety miles up the Lulea Biver to its junction with the
Little LuleS. at Storbachen, and across the frontier of Sweden into
Lapland, which commences about ten miles below the confluence.
The scenery is extremely striktug, especially towards the end of
the^road. The river is a noble stream, never narrower than the
Thames at Westminster, and expanding at intervals iAto broad

NOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

696

strctclies of water wliicli, shut in by ibe windings of the river, pre-
sent the appearance of considerable lakes. The banks are lined with
the pine forests for many miles, and the dark green of the firs and
larches is varied by the brighter foliage and silver bark of the
birches, which grow in considerable numbers among the other
trees. At intervals, gradually getting longer as the distance from
Lulea increases, the villages or settlements of the Swedish farmers
break the uniformity of the scene, and the wooden houses and out-
buildings, painted bright red, with the windows and doors picked
out in white, and surrounded by small clearings with patches of
yellow barley and green pasture, stand out brightly against the
sombre background of the forests, and give animation and warmth
to the landscape. It is difficult to convey the peculiar fascination of
this scenery. It is due especially to the sharpness and contrast of
colour, the bright clear blue of the sky giving definiteness to the
outlines of the trees and hills, and bringing into marked relief all ^
the incidents of the view. There is something bracing in the very
appearance of the landscape, to which the noble river is an ever-fitting
foreground.

At Storbachen the river has to be exchanged for the road, and a
countiy cart holding two persons, and with or without an apology
for springs as chance may determine, carries the tourist along the
banks of the Little Lulea to Jockraock, a distance of some thirty
miles. This drive is in itself a unique experience. The road after
wet weather is cut up into deep ruts, in and out of which the cart
plunges with a violence most discomfiting to its occupants, who are
bruised and pounded without the possibility of resistance. It must
bo admitted that the process detracts from the pleasure of the
excursion, which in other respects is extremely interesting.
The route lies for the whole day through the almost trackless
forests. Hardly a human being is to be met in these immense soli-
tudes, and the silence is only broken occasionally by the note of
some strange bird or the movement of the wind through the trees.
In many places forest fires have ravaged the country for great dis-
tances, and evciy where there is a vista of blackened stems or falling
trunks. In contrast to this desolation, where the fire has not
pa^ed the ground is carpeted with most luxuriant mosses and
lichens in all the tints of green and red and yellow, while an occa-
sional clearing, though at very rare intervals, relieves from time to
time a sense of utter loneliness by the evidence it gives of the
neighbourhood of human beings.

The forests cover nearly one-half of the whole surface of Sweden,
and constitute an important part of the wealth of. the country and
the revenue of the Government. In past times they were very care-
lessly managed, and in many cases were sold outright and without

®96 A VISIT TO lA]?LANi), WITH .

oonditionfi to mercHants^ wlio ruthlessly cut down the timber with
sole regard to their immediate interests. The jrine is of very slow
growth, increasing only one inch in diameter in ten . years, and
reaching twelve to fourteen inches in a century ; and the wholesale
destruction of young wood has left large tracts desolate and unprofit-
able for an indefinite period. The soil is excessively poor, consist-
ing of sand with the thinnest possible coating of vegetable mould, so
that no ordinary cultivation is possible.

Now the forests are strictly looked after, and no land is sold ; but
the right of cutting wood, limited to trees of ten inches and upwards
in diameter, is let for a term of years and by tender, at so much
per tree. In the remote districts the royalty is about Is. Sd. per
tree, and the lessees have in addition to carry out works for deepening
the rivers and keeping them clear of all obstructions. Twenty
years ago the value of trees on the ground was not more than three-
pence or fourpence apiece.

From Jockmock to the end of the journey at Quickjock
the mode of travelling and the scenery are again changed. The
head-waters of the Littlo Lulea are a series of large lakes,
from six to thirty miles long, and varying in breadth from
two miles to seven or eight. These in turn are fed by two
mountain rivers, which join their fioods at Quickjock, and pour the
united stream into the uppermost lake. They are traversed in long
open boats made of very thin wood, and rowed by two or three men,
according to the weight of luggage and the length of the journey.
These boats are unprovided with seats, and the passengers have to
squat at the bottom back to back, or crowded side by side ; and as
very little movement would be sufficient to swamp so frail a craft,
the limbs get cramped and stiffened, and the journey becomes very
fatiguing. With a high wind the broadest lakes become rough and
dangerous, and on one occasion we shipped so much water that it
seemed doubtful whether our expedition would not conl^ to an un-
timely end. Each lake is connected with the next by strong rapids,
in some cases rising into small waterfalls, and to avoid these it is
necessary to disembark, when the luggage is carried on the shoulders
of the rowers through the pine forests to the next lake. Through-
out this part of the trip the silence can almost be felt, and becemes
at last oppressive. STo living thing is seen for hours except occa-
sional flights of wild birds, or a soUtary heron disturbed by the pas-
sage of the boat. Hills, gradually developing into mountains, and
fiz^y covered with snow as the neighbourhood of Quickjock is
reached, shut in the scene, and the slopes of these are covered
almost entirely with stunted pin^ the birch having nearly dis-
appeqired. There is, however, no lack of colour, as the firs in the
^ualight present many shades of the darker greens intermingled

KOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

«97

witli a rich bro^ni where some disease appears to have attacked the
trees. A large sweep of pine forest thus spread out in an amphi-
theatre of hills and seen from a great distance might be mistaken for '
an expanse of heather and fern, browned by the autumn rains and
sun, though of course the brighter purples are absent from the
Lapland view.

In the summer months there is perpetual daylight in all these
regions, and the midnight sun is visible for some time in June.
When wc were there in September it was light till nine or ten
o’clock, and never absolutely dark. The sunsets were most gor-
geous, dark masses of purple clouds being lit up with the intensest
hues of gold and crimson as the sun went down behind them, a
glowing ball of fire. On one occasion the effect was heightened
by the appearance of the eastern sky, which shaded off from deepest
rose at the zenith, through delicate gradations of pinks and purples,
into a lovely pale pure blue, in the midst of which the full autumnal
moon shone gloriously.

The fishing in the lakes is exceedingly good, and very large
trout, and oven salmon, may be caught with the minnow and other
spinning bait. For fly-fishing the best places are the rapids between
the lakes, through which the boat is screwed in and out in an ex-
tremely clever and dexterous way by the boatman, who takes ad-
vantage of the shelter of every rock and stone as he passes from one
to the other/ while the stream shoots by. In favourable weather an
angler may easily land a hundredweight of trout and grayling in a
day’s sport, the fish running from half a pound to two pounds in
weight. The flies sold by the London makers should be supple-
mented by some of a smaller size for bright weather and clear water;
one with a body of yellow silk and greyish brown wings is said to
be very killing.

The distance from Jockmock to Quickjock, the two principal
villages on the route, is about ninety miles, and is performed in three
days. Each of these places has a church, a school, and a post-office,
and Jockmock is said to have a shop, though we could not find it.
They are really collections of small wooden huts, vacant during the
summer months, but occupied in the long winter by the Laps, who
thn come down from the moimtains with their reindeer. Quickjock
especially is in a delightful situation, facing a beautiful lake, and
sheltered by mountains of noble outlines and grand proportions. At
Jockmock there are some fine falls, not unlike the Rheinfalls at
Schaffhausen, though in a very different setting. The resting-
places or stations between these two villages are not inns in the
usual sense of the word, but the houses of the Swedish settlers or
immigrants into Lapland, one of which at each settlement is destined
for the reception of the occasional guests.

698

A VISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH

These setdements consist of two or perhaps four houses, with the
necessary outbuildings, and seem generally inhabited by the several
members of the same family. Some of them have existed a consider-
able time, and are occupied now by the grandchildren or great-
grandchildren of the original settlers. Originally the Government
granted free gifts of land, but they have now ceased to do this, and
the number of the settlers does not appear to be receiving many
additions from outside. The houses usually consist of two or more
large rooms on the ground-floor with lofts above, and vast chimney
hearths in one comer, in which the logs of pine, some two or three
feet in length, are piled upright when a fire is wanted ; being lit,
they bum up in a few minutes into a roaring fire which gives out an
intense heat. The family live chiefly in the kitchen, and this and
the guest-chamber are about twenty or thirty feet square, and furnished
with a kind of sofa bedstead which pulls out so as to afibrd a sleep-
ing accommodation of about 5 feet 6 inches by 3 feet. The kitchen
itself is not over clean, nor are the personal habits of the people
without reproach in this respect ; yet the guest-chamber, the linen,
and the crockery leave nothing to be desired.

The houses are surrounded by a small clearing, where the settlers
cultivate for their own consumption sufficient oats and other grain,
hay, and potatoes. They sow their com in June, and so rapid is the
growth under the influence of the lengtlicncd days that they reap
the harvest in six or seven weeks afterwards, and sometimes get two
crops in their short season. The cultivation is restricted to the
actual wants of the settlement, as the difficulty of transit precludes
the possibility of a market for the surplus. Cattle and ponies, and
sometimes sheep and poultry, are kept at each station, but the food
of the family is limited to fish — which is dried for winter use —
milk, black or rather brown flat bread, and dried reinflesh, with an
occasional change in the shape of game or wild fowl killed on the
hiUs or lakes. Everywhere, even in the poorest houscsj the most
excellent coflee is obtainable ; the green berries being roasted over
the fire and ground whenever a cupful or more is wanted.

In the winter, when the lakes and rivers are all frozen, and the
ground is covered three or four feet deep with hard snow, the settlers
go long distances on snow-shoes and in sledges, and bring up fjpm
Lulea what stores they may require. The money for such purchases
is gained by winter labour in tho forests, where the trees are felled
and dragged to the water’s edge, to be thrown in and floated
down to Lulea when the ice breaks up. At this work a team of one
horse and two men can earn about 40s. a week, which is considered
large wages in this part of the world. The legal tariff for a boat in
summer is 1 kronor (Is. lid. English) for each man for seven miles,
with no allowance for back fare ; and a small dricks penntngar, or

NOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

pour-lxnret added to this will make them supremely grateful, and
ensure the generous donor many hearty shakes of the hand.

The settlors cannot afford to he ill, as the nearest doctor lives at
Lulea, almost a week’s journey from Quickjock. In ordinary cases
they depend on their own resources, but in any serious illness the
Lulea medico is sent for and is obliged to attend, being paid a small
salary of £200 a year by Government on this condition. Midwifery
is performed by women. Crimes of any kind seem to be very rare ;
and though every settlor carries a most ugly-looking dagger-knife
suspended from his belt, its use appears to be confined to purely
pacific purposes. The most common offences arc against the forest
regulations, and the observance of these is superintended by an
officer who has his head-quarters at Jockmock. On ffite days, at
this latter village, a patrol is selected by the Governor of Lulea from
among the steadiest of the settlers, and to him the preservation of
order is entrusted.

The men arc physically a fine race, and arc generally honest and
industrious, with an air of independence and 'straightforwardness.
Like the poorer Swedes elsewhere, they arc greatly given to the
use of tobacco in all forms ; and besides smoking and chewing in
the usual approved methods, they actually cat large quantities of
snuff, helping themselves, as the Highlanders do, with a horn spoon
from a box. The women have pleasant faces with rather refined
expression. There is a strong family resemblance among them,
and the type consists in large grey eyes, brown hair, rather fair
complexions, a free carriage, and not ungraceful figure, though
with full waists and large hands and feet. The older women look
worn, but never have the haggish and almost brutalised look which
is not uncommon in old women in other countries who have led
hard outdoor lives. The general expression of countenance is
somewhat pathetic, though they seem contented with their strange,
solitary, and joyless life ; and we could never get any of them to
confess that they would care to change it, nor even to complain of
what, as it appeared to us, must be the terrible monotony and hard-
ship of the long dark winier. In looking at these settlements and
considering the nature of the life we seemed to understand more
clearl}^ the position and circumstances of the emigrants who are
gradually pushing farther and farther along the shores of the great
rivers of the American continent, and carrying into the solitudes
of the immense forests of the West the proofs of Anglo-Saxon courage,
endurance, and pertinacity.

At some of the stations we saw specimens of the original inhabit-
ants of the lands within the Arctic Circle, in the persons of Lap men
and *women of uncertain age, about four feet high, and dressed in
skins with blue conical caps on their heads. In I^orway it is said

700

A YISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH

that the Laps are looked upon and treated as an inferior race, the
pariahs of the ]!^orth; but in Swedish Lapland there is no appear-
ance of such distinctions. The comfort and even safety of the
settlers depend so much on their good relations with their neigh-
bours that they havo remained on terms of equality and friendship.
Intermarriages are not uncommon, and many of the present settlers
diow signs of the mixture of the races.

The population of Swedish Lapland is said to include 4,000
persons of true Lap race, and in some districts this number is
increasing. The children born in the mountains die fast, but those
who remain in the villages are healthy. Provision is made for their
instruction, and in common with the children of the Swedes they all
learn to read and write, though, judging by the absence of books at
the settlements, they reap little advantage from their instruction.
The Laps were converted to Lutheranism some hundred years ago,
and are said to be strict religionists. At the present time some kind
of revival is going on among them, a faint reflex of the Moody and
Sankey movement in this country and America.

They depend for their living entirely upon their reindeer, which
they take up into the mountains all the summer, feeding them in
the villages during the winter, when the rein-moss, which is their
ordinary food, is no longer obtainable in the woods. This migration
is rendered necessary by the habits of the reindeer, which must be
near snow to keep in health. When on their summer excursions,
the Laps live in tents made of rein-skins, lying at night round a fire
in tho centre, a hole being left in the roof for the passage of the
smoke. Their food consists of rein-flesh, fish, and game, and they
keep a pot, like the gipsies, constantly on the fire, into which are
thrown all contributions in tho way of edibles, which are thus
stewed down together into a thick rich soup. In the winter they
move about on their snow-shoes, in the management of which they
are extremely adrCit, shooting down the hills and in lind out of the
trees with immense swiftness and precision. On these shoes they
hunt down both wolves afld bears when these animals, which are
now getting scarce, cross their path; they kill them with their
spears and knives, getting a reward of 50 kronor from the Govern-
ment for each head killed. The sale of spirits is strictly prohibited
in Lapland, as some years ago their immoderate use was decimating
the population ; but kegs of branvin are stiU occasionally smuggled
aoross the borders, and produced on the occasion of fStes and
holidays. The Laps have shrewd, almost cunning faces, and,
though small in stature, possess great bodily strength and endur-
anoe. Their habits are extremely dirty, and they appear never
their clothes till they f^ to pieces.

SrOlBS ON SWEDISH LIGENSING.

701

IL

One of our chief objects in visiting Sweden was to inquire on the
spot into the operation of the licensing laws of the country, and
especially to make a personal acquaintance with the system adopted
in Gothenburg, where the trade in spirits is carried on by a com-
pany for the sole benefit of the community, to whose use all tho
profits are devoted. We had introductions to gentlemen of infiuence
in Stockholm and Gothenburg ; and we lost no opportunity of
ascertaining local opinion with regard to the working of this system
and the question generally. The novel experiment of carrying on
public-houses on behalf of the municipality, by managers who are
practically public officials, and who have no interest in the profits of
the sale, is evidently attracting increasing interest in England ; and
we heard of many visitors who had preceded us with a similar object.
Some of these inquirers, who have since published the result of &eir
investigations, appear to have misunderstood altogether the scope of
the experiment and the object of its promoters. They discovered
that very large quantities of spirits are still sold in Gothenburg, and
that a great number of drunken persons are yearly arrested by the
police — ^facts which are sufficiently evident from all the statistics which
have been published on the subject — and thereupon they hastily pro-
nounced the system to be a failure and unworthy of further con-
sideration.

But the advocates of the scheme in Sweden — ^and these are the
whole of the educated classes, with the exception of the distillers —
say that as they never were sanguine enough to expect the absolute
suppression of drunkenness as the result of any practicable legislation,
so this is not the test by which their success in more limited aims is
to be finally judged.

** Experience has convinced mo,” said one of the ablest supporters of tho
Gothenburg system, ** that there is absolutely only one way by which drunken-
ness can be put down, and that is by tho entire prohibition of the use of
intoxicating drinks. But such a measure is utterly impracticable, and you have
therefore to consider how the evils attendant on tho consumption of liquor may
be reduced to a minimum. This is tho object which we hope we are gradually
accomplishing by our plan. Wo have done a greqt deal already, we have
securod the possibility of doing more ; and, as our experience iiiGroases, we are
continually trying to supplement and extend our previous efforts.”

The persons who have so readily convinced themselves of the
futility of the Gothenburg system are usually advocates of the
Permissive Bill, and it is strange that they should have neglected
the evidence, which is also afforded by Swedish experience, of the
same kind of partial failure in the practical working of that measure
as they trace in the results of the Gothenburg system. Each com-
mune in Sweden has the right of fixing periodically the number of

‘702 ^ A VISIT TO LAPLAOT), WITH

licenses^ if any, to be granted in its district. The governor of the
province may reduce, but cannot increase this number. Availing
themselves of this power, many country communes have refused to
have any licenses ; and thus in the province of Gothenburg, with a
rural population of 170,000, there are only ten licensed houses. But
no single toven (and the experience is suggestive cf what would
happen in England) has ventured to carry restriction so far, as the
feeling of the people, and especially of the working classes, will not
warrant such an extreme measure.

In the countrj^ districts, however, the result has been undoubtedly
satisfactory, and such as to encourage the members of the Alliance to
seek a similar power in this country ; but they must not estimate
its advantages too highly, or assume that it will entirely remove
the evil any more than anj other limited measure. The police
returns at Gothenburg show that out of 2,234 apprehensions for
drunkenness in 1874* no less than 724 were of countrymen coming
into the town on market days ; and it is said to be a regular thing
with many of them to make a periodical expedition to the nearest
place where spirits arc sold, in order to gratify their craving. On
these occasions their previous enforced abstinence is compensated for
by extraordinary potations. In addition to this, spirits are bought
wholesale by the peasants and kept for home consumption ; and
even in Lapland, where the sale is strictly prohibited over the whole
country, we were told that there was never any lack of liquor on
special occasions. These facts should moderate the hopes of those
who insist on regarding the Permissive Bill as the complete specific
.against intemperance instead of w’hat it really is, one of several
instruments by which the temptation to drunkenness may be reduced
to a minimum and its attendant evils greatly diminished.

In estimating the real value of such a novelty as the one intro-
duced by the Gothenburg Bolag, or Company, it is surely right to
attach great weight to the opinions of observers on ^he spot, who
may be supposed to have got over the first shock with which all
strange experiments are received, and to bo now in a position, after
more than ten years’ experience, to judge of the results impartially,
and without the prejudice of which a casual visitor has not time to
divest himself.

Now Swedish opinion is singularly unanimous on the point.
Again and again we were assured that, although there was some
opposition at the commencement of the plan, it has long ceased;
and the advantages of the system are now admitted by everybody
except the manufacturers of liquor, whoso continued hostility may
be accepted as a satisfactory indication of the probable diminution of
consumption, which cannot be proved in any other way, since the
statistics do not give the means of accurately comparing the total

NOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

703*

sales of spirits now with the sales before the Bolag was started.
But prorinoial governors, the clergy of all ranks, members of muni-
cipal corporations, and the press, not in Gothenburg only, but
throughout the country, unite in general commendation of the
system and tho results which have flowed from its adoption. At the
present time arrangements similar to those in Gothenburg are in
force in fifty-seven other towns, including Norrkoping, Oalskrona,
XJpsala, Jonkoping, and Lund; and in the capital itself, with a
population of 140,000, tho Town Council, by a majority of three to
one, have determined on the adoption of the system, which is to come
into force on October 1st, 1877. This resolution has followed on
an elaborate report by a special committee of the municipality of
Stockholm, appointed to consider the best means of reducing the
intemperance which unfortunately prevails. This report points out
at great length, and with very full iftistrations, the extreme diffi-
culty of arriving at just conclusions from statistics which vary in
different towns and at different times, and are affected by a great
number of very complex influences ; but it expresses the conviction
that such statistics are still valuable as a comparative measure of
tho increase and decrease of drunkenness, if compiled for a period
embracing a sufficient number of years, during which there is no
reason to suppose that the action of tho police has been to any con-
siderable extent changed.

The committee select, as periods for such comparison, the twelve
years 1851-C2, and an equal period embracing tho years 1863-74:
in the first of which there were three years of good harvests and
trade, seven average, and two bad ; and in tlie second, two good,
seven average, and three bad. They find that the proportion of
drunkenness to the population increased about 5 per cent, in the
latter period.

But a similar comparison in the case of Gothenburg shows a
diminution of drunkenness of more than 50 per cent, in the second
period of twelve years, during ten of which the new system has been
in operation. The report goes on to say : —

« Tke results obtained in Gothenburg appear to us by no means surprising,
but most natural. It is cloar that as the consumption of branvin is dependent
on the desire for stimulants and the power of satisfying that desire, and^also
the desire of gain on the part of the seller, tho consumption must decrease in
proportion as one of these influences ceases to operate ; and as the law does not
allow such a monopoly to a company unless the whole of the proflts are devoted
to public purposes wiffiout gain to any individual, we cannot but believe that
Bu^ a company in Stockholm would cause a diminished consumption of Spirits,
as it has done in Gothenburg. But if, contrary to all probability, such should
not bo the case, so many advantages in other respects would, in our opinion,
result from the adoption of the Gothenburg system that we have no hesitation
in recommending it. What are these advantages ?

In such a company the managers of the houses where spirits are sold

704

A yisrr to <with

derive no profit from their sale and have no interest in promoting it ; therefore
it may be considered certain that they will not disregard the rules of the com-
pany not to sell q)irits to those under age, to those who have already drunk to
excess, or to those who seem to wish to make the public-house their continual
resort. It is clear that as the managers will derive all the profit they can from
the sale of food, malt liquors, &c., and none from the sale of i^irits, they will
do all they can to promote the former, and thus the object of changing the
public-houses and dram-shops into eating-houses will be promoted.

** Nothing can have greater influence in counteracting ^e injurious effects of
public-houses on morality and order than if the management is in every respect
satis&ctory. The manager must therefore not only conduct it sufficiently well
to escape legal liability, but in addition must show he possesses that firmness,
zeal, and discretion which are required in his difficult position between the
demands of the consumers on the one hand and his duty to the community on
the other. In the present state of tho trade it cannot be expected that all
license-holders shall possess such qualities, still less subject themselves to
pecuniary sacrifices to procure such managers, or dismiss them for faults which
have escaped the notice of the poHco, although unfitting them for their position
as regards the good of the communi^, as they would thereby risk diminishing the
number of their customers and their profits. But we have every reason to expect
that a company zealous for morality, temperance, and order, and in a position
not to grudge the cost, will endeavour to obtain suitable managers, and imme-
diately dismiss those who are careless and inattentive to these objects. Expe-
rience proves that the larger, cleaner, and lighter the public-house, the less
attractive it is to tho drunkard, and those who most originate immorality and
disorder. It is readily conceded that late police regulations have done much
good ; but they cannot be applied to the numerous houses possessed by the
holders of the old class of privileges for life, and not subject to the conditions
of those licenses which are sold by auction : this would be remedied by a
company who would procure the most suitable promises without regard to cost,
and regulate their number and distribution only with reganl to the good of tho
community.”^

Gothenburg is a fine handsome town, with all the appearance of
great and increasing prosperity. Situated upon tho estuary of the
Gotha Eiver, a few miles from the sea, it is intersected by broad
canals, which, with wide streets on each side, give a space and open-
ness to the principal thoroughfares that is rarely seen in other
towns. Large saw-miUs, iron-works, and breweries^ with other
manufactures, give employment to a great number of workpeople ;
while the shipping business collects, in the neighbourhood of the
quays, the same class of population as is to be found in our own
ports of Liverpool, Hull, or Bristol. In walking through the
streets, both by day and night, we saw no drunken persons; but
probably should have had a different experience if our visit had
coincided with a holiday or fiSte. The rules of the police are
stringent, and all persons seen to be the worse for liquor are sum-
moned, and if necessary locked up till sober. To account for the
number of such cases, in spite of the regulations observed, the fol-
lowing reasons were given. In the first place, at least one-third of

(1) **Beport cf Committee of the Municipality of Stoddiolm,’* translated by David
Oamiagie^ Suapkin, Manhall, and Co.

NOTES ON SWEDISH LIGENSINO.

706

the drunkenness reported by the police is attributable to steangers
and country people coming from outside. Then the food of the
working class is so lights consisting chiefly of fish and milk diet^
that comparatively small quantities of spirits are sufficient to turn
their heads. The old race of habitual drunkards has not yet died
out^ and their repeated convictions, under the strict supervision
adopted, account for many entries in the register of the police. It
is hoped that the new generation will show fewer of these victims to
a chronic disease. Till very recently, when a park has been opened
for the people, Gothenburg has been absolutely without any public pro-
vision for the innocent recreation of its inhabitants, and the practice
of public-house drinking has thus been stimulated by the absence of
any countervailing attraction. And, lastly, tho so-called temperance
houses, where beer and mne arc sold, and which are not under the
regulations or the control of the Bolag^aro supposed to be the source
of much drunkenness, as the liquors provided by them are frequently
adulterated or mixed with spirits, and in this form become the most
certain cause of intoxication. There is some question of including
these houses in the operations of the Bolag, and it appeared to us
that the experiment will be altogether incomplete till this has been
done. At present licenses are granted freely in those cases to all
persons who can bring a certificate of respectability, and thus stand
on a similar footing to our licenses to sell off the promises, which
cannot be refused by the magistrates except to notoriously bad
characters.

We visited the public-liouses both by day and night, and in
different parts of tho town, paying most attention to those in the
worst districts, and remaining till nearly nine o’clock, when all are
closed. The hours of work are very early in Gothenburg, and the
workmen do not remain out late, so that after nine o’clock the streets
are almost deserted. Generally speaking, the houses are plain and
uninviting, and the accommodation consists of a bar, a room
answering to the bar-parlour of English houses, on eating-room
or mat-sal, and another for customers of rather a better order. It is
part of the system that each house shall be an eating-house as well
as a drinking-shop ; and in the rooms set apart for this purpose no
drinking ie allowed without eating, the drink is only served
as the ordinary accompaniment to the meal. A bill* of fare and
tariff of prices is fixed in the room. A plate of soup is charged
10 oere, or 1^^. ; a plate of meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes,
25 oere, or 3^.; and we had practical demonstration that these
viands were of good quality and ample in quantity. In the superior
room the charge for a plate of meat was 50 oere, or ; but this
included the luxury of table napkins and a better service. The
managers, who in some cases derive their sole remuneration from the

706

A VISIT TO LAPLAND, WITH

profit on these sales, and on cojSee, tea, &c., and in all cases are
partly dependent on them, do a considerable business, one man
telling us that he had taken 77 kronor (about £4 7s.) in the day
for food alone.

The drinking proper is done in the bar-room, and standing. The
Svredes do not sit down to booze like our English drinkers, but toss
oflF their glass of neat branvin at one gulp, and then walk away — to
return again for another after a short interval if not satisfied with the
first supply. The bar-parlour is occupied by customers who come
rather for society than for drink, and who sit chatting at little tables,
with generally a glass of brandy-and- water before them.

During the day we saw no one drunk ; but at night, and in the
worst districts, we observed two or three men in each house who had
had more than was good for them. There was not the least disorder,
however, and we noticed that when these men applied to be served
again they were invariably refused, if there was the least unsteadi-
ness in their appearance, and told to go home. In two cases they
were turned out of the shop. Wo were accompanied in our inspec-
tion by Mr. EUiot, the chief of police, and when, on one occasion, we
expressed a wish to see the lower class of houses, we were assured
that the one we were then in was the worst in the town, being near
the quays and frequented by the lowest part of the population. In
bygone times, and before the introduction of the now system, it was
as notorious among the sea-going people as some of the dens in
Eotterdam are now, and was the resort of prostitutes and bad
characters, and a scene of constant riot and disorder. Now it will
compare favourably with many a public-house, reputed respectable,
in London and our large provincial towns. In this house there
seemed to be little demand for food, and the sale of branvin averaged
forty kans, or twenty-four gallons, per day. We noticed here, as
elsewhere, that not a single woman was among the customers, and
we understood that the presence of prostitutes was strictly forbidden.
Mr. Elliot is a strong supporter of the Bolag system, and assured
us that its introduction had most materially contributed to the good
order of the town, in which there is at present very little serious
crime of any kind.

Besides the ordinary supervision of the police, there is a special
inspector appointed by the Bolag to see that all its regulations are
observed and that there is no fraud on the part of the managers ;
but since the establishment of the company there has been only one
case necessitating the dismissal of a manager. The profits made
by the Bolag, and now devoted to public uses, are enormous, and
the financial success of the undertaking has actually formed part of
tihe indictment brought against it by the more extreme advocates of
t^perance. These profits, however, are due in part to the immense

KOTES ON SWEDISH LICENSING.

I

707

saving in the cost of management effected by the large reduction in the
number of separate houses, and still more to a considerable increase
in the price of spirits, which has been made chiefly in the hope of
restricting the consumption. As, however, a fair-sized glass of
neat spirits is still to be obtained for one penny, it may be doubted
whether many people are restrained from drinking by considera-
tions of economy.

Licenses in Sweden are put up to auction and let to the highest
bidder. When the Bolag started in 1865, their tender was 60,000
kronor per annum ; but on the last occasion they were driven up
by the competition of a Stockholm distiller to 360,000 kronor per
annum. The actual profits have been 140,000 kronor in excess of
the original tender ; and the total advantage of the system to the
ratepayer, as compared with the former state of things, when
possibly the tenders were let too low in consequence of the absence of
free competition, is represented by 440,000 kronor, or nearly £25,000
per annum.

The promoters of the company had one great advantage over the
advocates of any similar plan in this country, and that is, that they
had no vested interests to deal with, as the licenses in Sweden expire
every three years, and are then let anew, with any fresh conditions
that may be thought desirable. But in Stockholm there are a
number of perpetual and life licenses in existence, granted before
the change in the law, and which will have to be extinguished by
payment of compensation. In consequence of this the Stockholm
authorities anticipate only a moderate profit in the first instance,
and are guided in their recommendations by their hopes of social
and moral improvement.

In the Fortnightly Eevtew for May, 1876, the present writer
suggested the modifications which appear to be necessary before the
Gothenburg system could be applied in England ; and a visit to the
town has strengthened the belief that, with these changes, the plan
would work very considerable and beneficial results in this country.

Putting aside the thorough-going supporters of total prohibition,
who would absolutely abolish the sale throughout the length and
breadth of the country, there is no other class of temperance re-
formers who may not hope to gain from this system the objects they
seek. Thus the friends of the Ptrmissive BUI would secure the
local right of veto, which is the cardinal principle of their measure.
The Sunday Closing Association might confidently expect the closing
of the houses on Sunday, a result which has invariably followed the
adoption of the Gothenburg system in Sweden. A great reduction
in the number of houses ; the entire prevention of adulteration ; the
removal of all extraneous temptation, such as is now offered by the
garish attractions of our gin-palaces, and by the music, the gambling,

VOL. XX. N.S. 3 b

708

A VISIT TO CAPLAMl).

and the bad compan j which are permitted or winked at in so many
oases; the restoration of the yiotuaUer’s trade to its original inten*
tion, and the provision of alternatives and substitates for the intozi*
eating drinltH to which the traffic is now confined ; the observance of
the sMctest order, and the certainty that all police regulations, now
too often a dead letter, or enforced only by the employment of deteo
tives, will be invariably obeyed — ^these are results wUoh all Mends
of temperance arc united in desiring, and which are proved to follow
the adoption of the principle that the sale of strong drink is a
monopoly which can only safely be entrusted to the control of the
representatives and trustees of the community, and which should be
carried on for the convenience and advantage of the people, and not
for the private gain of individuals.

The experiment may be tried on a large scale in this country, and
these advantages may with certainty be secured if two conditions be
observed; first, that Parliament will adopt the principle above
defined, and secondly that it will undertake to determine a fixed
scale on which the existing interests may be bought up and trans*
ferred. This last point is imperative, since without it no corporation
would be justified in entering upon what would be a gigantic specula-
tion without settled data. The experience of open arbitration has
been so disastrous in the cose of public bodies, and the claims made
before and allowed by such tribunals have been so monstrous and
extortionate, that no prudent municipality would risk any large
undertaking on such terms. There can, however, be no real diffi-
culty in deciding, once for all, how many years’ purchase of proved
profits ought to bo given by a community desirous of recovering tho^
rights which have been most unfortunately sufiered to slip away in
the course of recent licensing legislation. The original intention of
Parliament was to give only one year’s property in a license to its
holder ; and now that Parliament, by its Ihim, has allowed this
annual tenancy to become a freehold, it is not too much tn ask that
it should take the trouble to arbitrate as between its constituents
and the publicans, and declare by statute the basis on which the
community may re-enter on its rights.

J. ClUMBEBLAm.

CROSS AND CRESCENT.

Whatever else is doubtful in this time of suspense^ one thing is not
doubtful. The existing rule of the Porte is scandalously evil, and
its system abominably corrupt. Other governments in Europe have
their special evils ; one is weak, another corrupt, acnother oppressive,
and a fourth sanguinary ; but the Ottoman rule combines every evil
in its worst form : it is usually corrupt, feeble, barbarous, capricious,
and capable of horrible cruelty. It gives no regular protection to
life or property ; its system of taxation is little more than plunder
legalised; the first duties of a government are left undone;
industry is treated as if it were treason; and the insurrections
its oppression produces are periodically crushed by massacre,
outrage and terrorism. And the whole of this system of misgovem-
ment and tyranny seems to exist for the sake of a small official class,
many of whom are the vilest of men. It is a waste of words to
describe further this shocking disorganization of society, for a thou-
sand witnesses have proved it ; and none attempt to gainsay it.

Rut then this picture, black as it is, is very far from the whole
truth. In the first place, it is oppressive not to the Christians alone.
It is a system oppressive to all who live under it, both Mussulman
and Christian subjects ; although in many provinces the Christian
races arc victims of a second oppression. Evil as the system is, it is
certainly not worse than that of other Asiatic governments, at least
in its effect upon the people it rules. No one has pretended to say
that the condition of the Rulgarian peasant is at all to be compared
in misery to that of the Egyptian fellaheen, the victims of a system
in which the English money-lender and the British government more
or less indirectly participate. It is hardly contended that the
government of Persia is much in advance of that of the Sultan in
energy, enlightenment, and honesty ; and the Shah is our excellent
friend and ^ly. The ruthlessness of the Pashas is, perhaps, not
greater than that of the Mandarins at a time of imperial anarchy ;
and tho chaos in Bosnia and Bulgaria has hardly ever equalled that
of Japan in the last days of the Daimios and Ronins. So that in de-
nouncing this Ottoman government it is as well to remember that
we mean simply that it still retains its old Asiatic type.

But further than this. The Ottoman *rule, as it is, is not much
worse than that of European governments at their worst in evil
times. The condition of Bulgaria at this moment is not more heart-
rending than was the condition of Ireland after the rebellion of
1798, or of Poland after the close of the last insurrection. It is

3 B 2 «

m

710

CBOSS AND OIUSSOIINI.

not BO dreadful as is often that of a black population where the
planters have stamped out some ahortive riot. Ike iniquity of the
Sultan’s govenunent is not deeper than that of £ing Bomba. The
bhaoB of it is not equal to that in which Spain has fouild herself
more than once within this century. There is in Turkey no tyranny
BO vast, so cemented by custom and law, as was that of the ancient
noblesse in France and in parts of Germany before the revolution.
The Christian rayah of the Balkan is hardly worse off than were the
Bussian serfs down to recent memory ; than were negro slaves in the
swamps of the Mississippi ; than are the coolies whom Englishmen
and Americans export and oppress. The lawlessness of Boumclia is
hardly greater than has been, in living memory, the lawlessness of
Sicily, of Cuba, of Carolina, of Ireland. Perhaps the closest of all
parallels to the rale of the Porte was in the worst days of the
temporal power of the Pope ; when it neglected everything which a
government ought to do, and did everything which a government
ought to avoid. Nay, more, the latest observers have told us that the
actual peasant of Bulgaria is at this moment better fed, better housed,
better dothed than the peasant of England or Ireland, in spite of
the beneficent rule we enjoy. He is better off than the Bussian
mujik which he seems destined to become. It is certain that he is
a prosperous and fortunate being if compared with the peasant of
the Nile, the subject of our excellent friend the Mussulman Khedive
of Egypt.

Now these cases do not at all prove — ^they are not intended to
suggest — ^that the Ottoman rule as a whole is no worse than its
neighbours in Europe. There is this great difference : that we are
not responsible for the Asiatic governments, as we are for the Turk.
And no government in Europe is so steadily bad. We do not
suppose that. any government in Europe, at least in this century,
'..has united so consistently all the evils of the Ottoman system ; its
apathy, its venality, its stupidity, its ferocity. But it iS dear, first,
that it is a government of the common Asiatic type ; secondly, that
European nations have exhibited in turn flagrant examples of all
of its evils, and now and then all of them together. The govern*
ment, vicious and wicked as it is, is not altogether different from
Eastern governments which we treat as aUies, and do not propose
to annihilate. It is not altogether different from what Christian
and European governments have occasionally been. And lastly it
is not so grinding to the wet&ure of its subjects as some systems
we have known, negro slavery, serfdom, and peasant destitution,
which may not be the work of any government at all; but which
certainly ^ve been the outcome of Chrislian institutums, and were
inamtaiuied a Christian people.

CROSS AND GBESGE19T.

711

The practical question, however, is not what is the exact morid
culpability of the Ottoman system? but how does it make it our
duty to interfere P Not is this quite so easy a matter to answer as
some people think. Here is a state which for centuries has
been the ally of European states, an odiously corrupt and cruel
government, as corrupt and cruel as was that of the old
Bourbons, as unscrupulous as that of the later Bourbons ; with a
dominant race who have held their lands and their rule for three
centuries, almost as oppressive as the feudal noblesse of the last
century, as ferocious as the Russians in Poland in our own day,
or as the Protestant loyalists in Ireland in the days of our grand-
fathers. It needs little to show what are the evils we incur when
foreign nations sweep away any dominant race, destroy any oppressive
government, or put down a system of religious injustice. England,
indeed, attempted in 1793 not to sweep away, but to restore, the
French noblesse, bag and baggage, with their marshals and their
governors, their intendants and their farmers-general, their provosts
and their gens-d’armes. The French Republicans interfered to
sweep away aristocracy and monarchy from many neighbouring
nations, and landed in Ireland in the name of humanity to put
down the ascendancy of the bloody ruling class. We can all see
how thoroughly questionable in principle is interference of this kind.
If ever there was a case for just interference it might be said to
be that to put down the atrocious system of slavery. Tet we all
know that the remedy would be worse than the disease. An era
of general aggression and lawlessness would follow from the doctrine
that, given a dominant class, oppression, and misgovemment, it is
the right or duty of foreign nations to step in and crush it by arms.
It is a doctrine which will scarcely be established in the public law
of Europe by the rulers of Ireland and of Poland. It is true that
no single case of oppression in Europe is now so desperately evil
as is that of Turkey ; and in some of these cases of oppression the
government may be well-intentioned. But a Europe which accepts
the extinction of Poland, the annexation of Lorraine, the massacres
of French Republicans, and the barbarous civil wars of Spain, is
hardly yet competent to inaugurate the reign of justice and mercy
— at least by steel and gunpowder.

But it is easy to overstate even the corruption of this Turkish
government. Every single opinion in this unhappy business needs
to bo modified ; and the Sublime Porte itself is not absolutely and
inevitably evil. The pretence that the whole story of Ottoman
rule is one unbroken tale of blackness, is a simple outburst of
fanatical rhetoric. The spirit of Turkish ascendancy is at best but
a sinister type ; but it has spared the rival tribes and, sects within

712

CROSS AND CRESCENT.

its limits centuries of anarohj and strife. The sectaries, as 'we see,
Oatholics, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, pursue each other with
hitter hatred, which the Turkish authority alone prevents from
bursting into religions war. The empire is the seat of almost as
many antagonistic sects as England itsdf ; and unfortunatdy
Eastern sects do not confine themselves to a war of tongues, hut
the contemptuous toleration of the Turk at least forces them all to
Iceq) the peace. The rivalries and feuds of the complex races
within the empire are, if anything, yet more intricate and fierce ;
Hdlen, Slavonian, Albanian, and the rest, being madly jealous of
each other. So that men who know the vehemence of strife between
sects and races in the empire have been heard to assert, that with
all their griefs against the Turk, and each thirsting for mastery for
itself, the Ottoman rule is still the one which would be accq>tod as
the least galling to all ; in fact the only one possible, as it divides
them least. This was possibly true of the past; it explains the
historical existence of the Forte.

Nor is the Turkish government in itself uniformly and always
corrupt. It is a bit of theological malice which tries to persuade us
that all Mussulmans ore wild beasts, and the Turkish Empire a hell
upon earth. Men of sense well know that there are still some within it,
as there have always been, desirous of raising it to better things.
The misfortune is that they are so few, and, in the prevalent corrup-
tion, so powerless for good. But the fact remains, as our own gene-
ration has seen, that there are always amongst the rulers of Turkey
one or two men quite as honest and quite as capable as the average
officials of Europe. The Ottoman Empire, like so many ancient
empires, does still exhibit in its decay incredible powers of momen-
tary vitality ; and if it is unlikely, it is not beyond the bounds of
possibility, that a group of capable statesmen might yet be borne to
power by fortunate circumstances. The idea that the religion of
Mahomet breeds nothing but Ezzdins and Borgias is a stupid piece
of religious intolerance.

Now, if the Turkish Empire stood isolated from Europe altogether,
an island in the Atlantic, it might, perhaps, be left to work out its
own destiny ; as we have to leave Cuba, as we have to leave B!ayti.
It would be simply the case of a dominant race, yet capable of
maintaining its rule, grievously oppressive and corrupt, but only as
a matter of degree more corrupt and o{q>ressive than other dominant
races. Eniope has never adopted the doctrine that it is the duty of
foreign nations to invade their neighbours wherever they find an
(qBptessi^ government or race. And there are some who assert
that tbera is no more pretence' for Europe to interfere with the mis-
golDoaunnit of Turkey than thereis to intervene in the misgovemment

OBOSS AND CBESCENT.

713

of Me:[Ltco, or the oppression of the planters in the West. To this
we reply, that Turkey is not isolated from Europe ; but very closely
bound up with it by all kinds of ties — of religion, race, interest,
poUticai tradition, and geographical connection. The possession of
the Danube, the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, and the Archipelago is
a matter of vital moment to all the powers of Europe ; the oppression
of Ohristian races in Turkey is, and for a century has been, a source
of endless agitation to the neighbouring states ; and, above all, the
existence of the empire is from day to day the standing work of
European poHcy. It is mere self-deception for Englishmen of the abso-
lute lamez-faire school to repeat that this country cannot undertake to
set the world to rights, and must simply decline to interfere with
Turkey. The statm quo in the East does not mean not interfering.
It means interfering to maintain a very active but veiled support.
Ever since the Orimean war at least, the existence of Turkey has
been due to the fact that the Western powers oppose the extinction
of the Porte ; to the conviction above all that the whole strength of
England would b^ thrown into the scale before the Turks should be
driven into the Bosphorus. The one direct question of the day is
this : — Is England prepared to recognise and renew this standing
engagement, and especially is she willing to renew it without
conditions P

Here then, to go no farther, we have a dilemma of almost endless
complexity. It is precisely such a case as that which exercised the
ingenuity of the great statesmen of Elizabeth, when they drew out
a double table of reasons pro and con for the adoption of some policy
or project. Every argument has its answer; every answer its
rejoinder. The result we see in the clash of passion which for
months has divided our statesmen and our parties, our journals and
our discussions. On the one hand, it is said, — ^Here is a government
of extreme corruption, injustice, and cruelty. On the other hand,
many other governments are, or have been, almost as bad ; and the
world would be a scene of violence, if bad governments are to be
constantly overthrown by their neighbours. But the special evil of
this government is that it is the rule of a dominant race in manners,
language, law, and religion, opposed to their subjects or victims. It
is replied, — ^But there are too many such cases — Poland is one — and
the evils of interference usually outweigh the advantages. But the
crimes of this oppression disturb all neighbouring states, and Europe
heaves and shakes on the verge of convulsion in consequence of it.
That may be ; but Europe must show that it is not about to deepen
the convulsion, and extend the area of war. But this dominant
race is the common oppressor of all Christian races. It is too true ;
but a war to extirpate a particular religion is an evil even greater

714

CROSS ARfB CRESCENT.

tlian oppresBioii and misgovemment. But one nation at 'least is
determined to make an end of this oppression. True, so it seems ;
and that nation cannot clear itself of the charge that it is about to
make a war which is a mixture of crusade and war of conquest.
But the oppression would not exist at all, unless the nations of the
West were giving it a virtual or moral support. To which it is
replied that the nations of the W^est have been only labouring to
avert what is cither anarchy or conquest, the opening of a strife
which must end in the general confusion of Europe. And so on,
through an endless succession of counter propositions.

ITow without affecting any sort of judicial solution to this tangle
of constant rejoinders, the preponderance of judgment inclines
towards real but qualified interference. The dangers of the status
quo are now at least distinctly greater than the dangers of action.
The arguments that the Ottoman rule is abominably evil ; that whilst
it remains unchanged and uncontrolled. Eastern Europe must con-
tinue in hopeless ferment ; that Russia most certainly opens war
unless it is controlled ; that the existence of this rule is practically
the work of ancient and continuing interference : — ^these arguments
would seem now to overpower the risks of entering on a course of
which no man can foretell the end, of proclaiming the doctrine that
evil governments are to be controlled by foreign neighbours. We
may hope then that, in spite of the unpardonable bluster of our
Premier about the integrity of the Porte, it may yet be possible to
rescue its subjects from the worst of their sufferings ; to circumscribe
the area of the evil which it works ; to force it, whilst it belongs to
the European, family of nations, to conform itself somewhat to
European conditions. It is idle any longer to dream of the statm quo
in Turkey as a guarantee for the peace of Europe, for it is become
its principal disturbing cause. Nor need any thought of the
nominal independence of the Porte stay the nations of the West
from wringing from it any guarantee for peace and better govern-
ment which policy or force can extort, within the limits we next
proceed to consider.

The limits of all efforts for the welfare of the subjects of Turkey
— ^limits to overstep which, we say, would bring evils worse than the
disease — ^are briefly these. To destroy the Ottoman rule, and then
to crush and keep in subjection the dominant Turkish race ; to offer
the Turkish Empire as a simple prize for conquest ; ^to proclaim a
war of religion, and to drive all Mahometans as such from their
power and possessions in Europe — ^these, we advisedly say, are evils
of such menace, so iniquitous in principle, so sanguinary to execute,
so ri& with incalculable disorder to the peace of Europe and to the
relations of humanity, that we will not accept them as remedies —

CBOSS AND CRESCENT.

715

no^ no^or the chance they promise us of thus ending the sufferings
of the rayahs ; no, not though our souls are wrimg by the blood
and crimes of Batak.

No man who will calmly consider these risks can venture to call
them imaginary. Gentlemen from platforms and pulpits may roundly
assure us that they only ask Lord Derby to put an end to the rule of
the Porte. But men who think calmly well know, that before the
Forte is abolished, the Turks must be crushed in a bloody, lengthy,
extended war ; that before such a war can be successful, it must
become a war of religion, of Cross against Crescent ; and that when
such a war is ended, the vast empire of the Ottomans can only be
left as the spoil of some conqueror or conquerors, who in turn will
be the danger and terror of Europe. These are the things which we
refuse to join in — ^to extirpate, expel, or crush a race of some millions ;
to open a new war of religion ; to abet a new era of conquest. It
needs but little to convince us how near we are to any or aH of these
projects, in the elastic name of humanity and civilisation.

Men talk of getting rid of the Turks — with or without their bag
and baggage — as if it were done, so soon as Lord Derby and Lord
Salisbury had signed a piece of paper. But one would think that
the course of the war had made one fact clearer than it was before.
Turkey has proved herself to be still a military power. However
rotten the empire may be, it has still some fight left in it, some
cohesion, some energy. The merits of the Servian army may be low
indeed ; still, when we come to put together all the difficulties which
the Turkish government has met, we find a power that yet must be
reckoned with. Bankrupt, harassed by the Great Powers, and
threatened by an invasion of almost all its smaller neighbours ; ill-
provided with roads, material, or officers ; she has yet succeeded in
carrying on war in three or four very difficult districts at once, and
in protecting her immense and scattered territory from invasion and
insurrection. If the Servian army was contemptible in itself, it was
largo at the outset, and it had the advantage of some generals of
excellent quality, and a splendid nucleus of Bussian volunteers. The
Montenegrins are consummate mountain warriors. In both cases!
the defence and the invasion had to be carried on in a most difficult
country and under most unfavourable local conditions. We have
seen what enormous sacrifices and how many years it cost Spain to
crush a few thousand Carlists in a mountain country. And we see
what disasters befall the brave Egyptian army in their petty
Abyssinian campaign. But the war with Servia and Montenegro
forms only part of the difficulties which Turkey has had to meet.
Greece, the islands, and Boumania had to be watched in Europe ;
and all the tribes, sects, and latent insurgents of the empire. Bussia

716

OHOSS Ain) OBESCENT.

liad to be watcbed in Asia ; the Blsu^k Sea and the ^gean hli^ to be
guarded ; and the heterogeneous levies drilled, equipped, and trans-
ported great distances under every kind of embarrassment. Two
Sultans had to be deposed ; ministers have been assassinated ; and
for months the empire has struggled on with latent revolution and
insurrection within. Beduce to their lowest the results which
Turkey has achieved, the fact remains undoubted : that, in the midst
of almost every difficulty and disaster which can beset a state, she
has in a few months utterly crushed a most formidable invasion.
The most strenuous believer in the corruption of the empire must
reluctantly admit that it has still a power of defence, such as, in the
last resort, might prove a very formidable force.

There can be no doubt now about the fighting quality of the
Turkish soldier. The disciplined troops, apart from the brutal
marauders, have every excellence of the warrior — discipline, endur-
ance, sobriety, alertness, and perfect fearlessness. The common
Mussulman linesman toils and dies without a murmur ; believing in
his own God, and practising his own religion with a reality unknown
to the modern Christian. lie is devout, unblenching, obedient; burning
with zeal for his faith and his sovereign ; not wantonly inhuman,
but entirely ready to be ruthless, when he is told to crush the
enemies of his creed. Europe has had a glimpse of that fanatical
and ferocious hero with whom our ancestors had such dreadful battle,
and may see what that being is like, the murderous and fearless
trooper who followed to the death some bloodthirsty captain of the
old times : Bichard of the Lion Heart, or Edward the Black Prince ;
Claverhouse’s band, or the Chouans of La Vendee; or any other
famous fighting savages, who thought it a pious work to slaughter
and lay waste in the name of what they called their God and their
king. Modem Europe, which has outgrown belief in its religion,
as well as the passions of its religion, is aghast to see the
fury of men who believe in their religion and mean to fight for
it. The ferocious soldier whom we have seen in Servia is only
a man who seriously does believe in the God of battles: so
^ar on a par with the Russian fanatic, he may be a trifle moret
barbarous. But indignation at his ferocity should not blind us to
his qualities ; for these are principal factors in the problem. Of the
mixed races of Turkey in Europe the Turks alone possess the quali-
ties of force and of command. It is a fact to be counted with, and
all the indignation in the world will not alter it. As a' simple matter
of siarength the average Bulgarian of the plain is no match for his •
Turkish master, any more than is the Servian, or the Greek, or the
Armenian. This survival of fighting and dominant power in the
Turk will eaqdain (as nothing else can) the continual resuscitation

GROSS AND CBRSOEirr.

717

of the Ottoman Empire. A hundred years ago, it seemed as weak as^
it is now ; even weaker and nearer to min. Again and again, it has
been driven from the Danube, and again and again it returns ; and
after countless defeats and disasters in those very valleys and
moimtainB, the Orescent was the other day- again in full cry for
Belgrade.

This dii^ses of the did idea that Turkey is merely a geographical
expression, that its government has no longer any resisting power
left. The Turks would evidently fight Bussia, or Europe itself,
before they recross the Bosphorus. Putting aside the invasion of other
neighbours and internal insurrection, it would probably strain the
resources of Bussia herself to make a successful conquest of Turkey.
It is &r from dear that the Bussians believe there is nothing but a
military parade between them and the Golden Horn. The Turks, it
is certain, regard the control of their own home provinces as equiva-
lent to their own existence in Europe. The &ct, then, is as proven
as any fact can be, that if the rule of the Osmanlis in Europe is
to be annihilated, it can only be by war ; and such a war must be
one of desperate ferocity, of unknown extent, and possibly of long
duration. It follows that those who call for the extinctien in Europe
of the Ottoman Empire, for the expulsion of its civil and military
officials, bag and baggage, across the Bosphoras, are simply calling
for a most bloody and most widespread war.

How about tffis there ought to be no sophistication. The anti-
quarian and theological fire-eaters who yearn for the reign of
Tzimisces and the true Cross are possibly prepared for a bloody war.
But perhaps politicians who simply intend to take the liberal view,
and exhibit their hatred of oppression, do not precisely contemplate
war as the result. Yet war is the inevitable consequence of what they
demand. To strip the Turks of all but nominal empire in Europe,
to plant Servians in Bulgaria, in Thessaly, in Epiros, and to shut the
Turks in Byzantium, as the Pope was restricted to Borne, if this is
to be done, it con only be done by fighting.

Unhappily it is not a simple matter of fighting. The destraction
of the government of Abdul Homed (a very easy matter) would not
suffice. The Turks in Europe are many millions, and they are
supported by ten times as many nullions in Asia. They have to
be crushed as a dominant class ; and when they have been crushed
they have to be kept in subjection. In effect they would have to be
diqmssessed of their lands, and driven as a race into Asia. It is
more than another Poland which has to be partitioned; it is on
Eastern religion and a settled race which have to be thrust out.
Tom it how we will, this is simply the' cry of the {mdent crusades.
And which of the nations of Europe can decently pretend that it is

718

CROSS AND CRESCENT.

entitled to act as the avenging Providence ? Though no European
power has reached to such height of misgovemment^ oppression^ and
periodical ferocity as stamp the rule of the Porte, few of the powers
of Europe are so clear of these offences as to justify their proclaiming
a crusade. As to Eussia, if her government is somewhat less,
oppressive than the Ottoman, and her type of Christianity superior
to the creed of the Prophet — ^and both have been doubted — her
record of cruelty is not reassuring. If we sum up all the deeds of
blood and rapine which have been wrought in Poland since the days
of Catherine, in the secular wars with the Turks, in wars with
Caucasian races and Tartar tribes, in massacres in Warsaw, in
stormings of Ismail, in slaughter of Circassians, down to the order
but the other day to exterminate the Yomuds, we shall conclude,
perhaps, that the roll of Turkish atrocit}’' is somewhat more red,
more revolting, more enormous, than the roll of Eussian atrocity;
but the difference, after all, is one of degree.

It is a fearful and humiliating thought, how often is the whole tale
of history stained from page to page with deeds of blood and horror.
Some dreadful incident impels our attention to a particular race or a
single epoch, and we are appalled to see the wickedness and fero-
city its inner history displays. It is as if with a magnifying glass
we look into some turbid drop of animal life, and arc aghast to see
what fierce and raging monsters torture and prey upon their fellows.
We forget how many a page of history can reveal to us this scene of
strife, when we fix our eyes upon its crimes in detail. We may go
through the whole black catalogue of crime and cruelty which has
stained even Christian nations in our quite modem times, and
summon one after another before the bar of outraged humanity.
How many hecatombs have been slain and provinces desolated in
purposeless cruelty ; what tales of slaughter, of burning, torture,
rape, and rapine, raging round the civilised world in the dynastic
wars and wars of plunder ; in wars of religion, of pai^y, and race ;
in savage rebellions, and yet more savage repressions; all the
horrors of the French Eevolution, of the Irish Eebellion, of Parisian
insurrections ! If we remember all that was done at Nantes and
Wicklow, at Badajoz and Warsaw, Milan and Pesth, Madrid and
Paris ; if we think of the slave-trade and the slave system, hardly
yet extinct in Christian nations, to say nothing of what has been
done in Algiers, and in Hindostan, in China and Japan, in Cuba
and in Carolina — quae caret ora cruore nostro ? — ^we may well wonder
which of the nations of Europe is called upon to extirpate the Turks
as monsters of cruelty and oppression.

We do not, by one word, seek to dull the sense of horror which
filled the world at the story of the Turkish crimes. We do not

CBOSS AND CBESCBNT.

719

preteiuV^that any single instance of the like in the slightest degree
reduces their enormity. But we learn that the crimes in Bulgaria
differ in degree, and not in kind, from the crimes of Christian
nations ; and that none of the nations of Europe haye the moral right
to enter on a crusade. Every one of them in turn, when pressed by
desperate pe^s, has asserted the ascendancy of race or class with
frightful cruelty ; and most of them are capable of doing it again.
It may be, notwithstanding, their duty to combine, that cruelty may
be chocked and oppression cease. But when we are asked to extir-
pate a dominant oppression, it is as well to know where we are to
stop. If the Turks are to be expelled from Europe, why are the
Eussians to be endured in Poland, or the Germans to be endured in
Lorraine P Some may say. Why is any dominant race to be endured,
which misgoverns, or is hateful to a people of different religion P
When we look into these questions, and all that they suggest, we see
that the proposal to root up the ascendancy of the Turks in Turkey
is at bottom a form of the doctrine that Mussulmans as such are to
be driven out of Europe. Now this is to resort to the principle of a
crusade. And a crusade such a scheme would be or become. For^
no military occupation or diplomatic manoouvro would end the reign
of Islam in Europe. It would become a crusade, merciless, pro-
longed, ever-extending; involving unknown horrors and dangers
not to be foreseen. The Turk with his back to the sea would die
hard ; and die like a Moslem.

The difficulty of extirpating Turkish ascendancy is not simply the
difficulty of getting rid of the Turk, short of a sanguinary war ; it
is the difficulty of knowing what is to be put in his place. Every
one scouts the idea that the divided and crushed subject-races are
yet fit to form independent states. Practically there is but one
issue now ready for the succession of the Ottoman; and that is
absorption in Eussia. But even assuming that the people are to
gain by this change, no one can doubt the alarm with which
Hungary, Austria, and Germany herself, would see the south-eastern
quarter of the Empire of the Hapsburgs engulphed in a Eussian
enclave. One who follows out the complexities of Austrian politics,
with its three great races and their many subdivisions ; the intricate
way in which Austrian politics are interlaced with the politics of
Germany; who will count up the jealousies, suspicions, hopes,
hatreds, and ambitions, the traditions and the interests interlocked
with each other in the tract between the Baltic and the Danube,
— such an one will doubt if Eussia can enter on the inheritance of
Turkey without preparing for Europe a long era of bloodshed.

Such were some of the dangers which so long kept practical men
from admitting the possibility of a new departure of Eastern policy.

720

GEOSS XSD GEESGEHT.

But tlie events of the present year have finally closed the established
non po88umu8 of the ancient policy. To struggle for the status quo
in its rigidity, the integrity and independence of the Porte, as the
treaties of Paris so hopefully decreed, is a policy that has now at
least three capital defects: it is shocking to our self-respect, it
xnakes war inevitable, and it would be certain to fail. We are far
away from the epoch of the Crimean war. The Ottoman rule is
being assailed not from without but from within; its enormities
have forfeited all claim to sympathy ; the attack comes now not from
the designs of the Bussian government, but from the agitation of
the Bussian people. Lastly, without France the defence of the
Ottoman Empire is palpably impossible. Words will not do it, and
we have no armies. Something must be done, and on a great scale ;
and that beyond securing a high road to India ; for the danger to
Europe is greater now than it was at the date of the Crimean war ;
and we have to deal no longer with the designs of an ambitious Czar,
but with the religious excitement of the Bussian people. In 1854,
what wo met was dynastic conquest ; in 1870 it threatens to be a
popular crusade ; and the latter, on the whole, is a deeper evil than
the former.

The entrance on the scene of the Bussian people would alone
forbid us to treat the Eastern question with the mystic words,
Idtssoz faire and non«intervention. We are so much accustomed to
denounce the Bussian greed of empire, and the Machiavellian con-
spiracies of her rulers, that we do some political injustice to the
Bussian people and the government of the Czar. Our entire judg-
ment on the question must be perverted, if we shut our eyes to the
fact which so many proofs have established, that the Bussian people
is stirred to its depths by irrepressible sympathy with the Christians
of Turkey. The people of Bussia, as being semi-civilised and semi-
Oricntol, are moved by zeal for religion and race with a fervour that
is hardly conceivable % Western industrialist nationsr It would be
wrong to forget that the Bussians are as capable of fanaticism for
the Cross as Moslems of fanaticism for Islam ; and if the Bussian
fanaticism is somewhat less violent, it is a great deal more constant.
We so instinctively decry religious and national enthusiasm as poli-
tical forces, that we run the risk of underrating their influence in
ruder societies. The agitation of the people in Bussia may not yet
amount to a crusade, but it is evidently real and perfectly intelli-
gible. There are no doubt intriguing committees and crazy enthu-
siasts about race, as active and as mischievous in Bussia as in any
part of the world ; but allowing to the full for the agitation which
skiHul managers can always stimulate or simulate, we can see real
signs of popular sympathy with the Christians of Turkey— a sym-

GROSS AND CBESCEITC.

721

pathy nihich the agitators merely inflame, and which the government
is unable to control. We have seen the fever of excitement which
shook the northern provinces of Italy so long as the southern were
under Austrian, Papal, or Bourbon tyranny ; and there is no ground
to think that the sympathy of the Russian people with their brethren
in Servia and Bulgaria is a whit less real than the feeling of the
men of Turin, Milan, and Genoa, for the victims of Haynau, Pius,
and Bomba. If the victims are neither so near, nor belong to the
same nation, on the other hand their suflerings appeal more keenly
to the imagination and to religious zeal. It is a strange instance of
the force of national jealousy that Englishmen who understood and
applauded the career of Garibaldi, should sneer at the Russian enthu-
siasm for the Christians of Turkey. But inasmuch as the Russian
people are far more religious, or rather more theological, than the
Italian — are in a far lower state of civilisation, and thus more liable
to the stupid fanaticism of race — as the Christians of Turkey are
not only of kindred race but of the same creed : we have every
ground for believing that their sympathy with their brethren across
the Danube is of a more passionate kind than any we have seen
in Italy. When D^Azeglio and Cavour, Ricasoli and Minghetti,
insisted that the good government of Italy was impossible whilst
Austrian and Papal and Bourbon oppression kept up a ceaseless
agitation in the peninsula, their plea was allowed as unanswerable
by the public opinion of Europe. There are indications enough that
the government, indeed the very crown, of Russia is becoming a
matter at stake, so long as the religious and national superstitions of
the Russian people are kept in constant excitement by the spectacle
of Mussulman oppression.

It is idle to grumble at a feeling which is certain to endure, and
even to increase. The feeling itself may be ill-informed, and grossly
one-sided ; but the national fanaticisms of eighty millions have to be
counted with us they cannot be reasoned with. It is exceedingly
likely that the Russian government, in its intrigues or in its weakness,
from time to time does something to stimulate this feeling ; it is
quite certain that adventurers — ^military, literary, and diplomatic —
play upon it as a thriving trade. Russian officers, like Prussian
officers, or British officers (the craving is not confined to one army^,
nor to two), undoubtedly crave for fresh careers ; the Russian
professor and journalist, raving about the Pandavonic race and its
destiny, is perhaps more violently and more sincerely cra^ about
his career than the Prussian professor and journalist maundering
about the Teutonic destiny, perhaps even than the Old English
professor, grinding his teeth over the paramount claims of Wessex
to the homage of mankind. But when we have made all the needful

722

CBOSS Ajn) CBESOBNT.

deductions for the ChauTinism of Bussian soldiers, the int^gues of
Bussian ofScials, and the bluster of literary agitators, the sohd fact
remains that the Bussian people cannot be kept quiet in sight of
Turkish misgovemment, and their sympathy with the Christian
victims is becoming an overpowering force.

It is simply jealousy and prejudice which set down every move-
ment of Bussian opinion to the orders of the government. It needs
no private intelligence to convince us how false is the popular ideal
of the imperial autocrat. Instead of the absolute monarch of com-
mon imagination, fixed as fate, omniscient, irresistible, serene as
an Olympian deity, mysteriously faithful to the will of Peter the
Great, and contriving all things by inspired decrees, the real Czar
is a puzzled, overworked, irresolute gentleman of benevolent inten-
tions and confused views ; anxious unto death about his vast trust,
fearing everything, suspicious of his ministers, timid about himself,
and uneasy about his throne ; dragged hither and thither by intriguers
whom ho cannot shake off, and checked at every turn by currents
of opinion which he cannot comprehend. If the truth were known,
there are probably few first ministers in Europe more harassed,
uncertain, and insecure than the Czar ; having less of a definite
policy, less free to fashion events, and more insecure of power. . It
seems certain that he of all men least desires to take up the traditions
of Catherine, knows best how loose is the organization of the huge
empire that he nominally governs, and has the best cause to dread
its further extension and fresh engagements. Perhaps these wild
raids across Asia, into which his soldiers drag him, and this Turkish
crusadp, in which his diplomatists entangle him, to him alone of all
Bussians come home in the silent hours of distrust with a weight of
sickening dread. There is something quite pathetic in the picture
we form of the kindly, indolent, nervous man, worried by gigantic
responsibilities and never-ending business, dreading the enterprises
which he dares not to refuse, and overmastered by man whom he is
afraid to trust. In this place of vast power of which he has lost
the mastery, in this necessity for enterprises for which he has no
heart, in this situation which forces an irresolute man to take great
resolves, there is much about Alexander II. which is ominously like
Hapoleon III. His personal position is not quite so precarious, and
his personal vanity is in no way so tempted ; but the parallel is too
close to be quite reassuring.

Those who know Bussia best are continually reminding us that
she is not so strong as she looks. The vast changes which a genera-
tion has produced are yet far from quietly settled ; the unwieldy
emjnre shows signs of the inevitable sundering which one day
aw:aits it. Men never will sufficiently admit that she is still haU

CBOSd AKD CBESGENT.

728

ABiatTcf that the civilisation which is the life of Western nations
cannot be forced to order upon the Muscovite, but becomes a weak-
ness instead of a strength. The anarchical democracy, the national
, rodomontade, the scientific militarism, the exotic industrialism, the
principal boasts of Bussian progress, are far from signs of a great
future, pT infallible proofs of strength. No one can doubt that the
enormous armies of Bussia would suffice to crush Turkey if it could
be done in a single campaign; but there is very great reason to
doubt if the gigantic machine of war into which Bussian life is
drained, is safe from internal collapse or could meet an obstinate
strain. We have often heard the story .of some over-trained
athlete, who with the muscular system of a Hercules broke down
from want of vital power. It would be to surrender their place as
civilised powers if the Western nations regard Bussia as the irre-
sistible Colossus, the inevitable mistress of Eastern Europe. On the
contrary there is every reason to hope that the races of Eastern
Europe may work out their own destiny quite outside of an over-
grown empire.

Now some would console themselves with the thought that the
extension of Bussia to the south will diminish her strength, increase
her vulnerability, and advance the hour of her ultimate dissolution.
In the long run all this may be true ; and the more farsighted of
Bussian statesmen may dread the day when she shall achieve her
ancient dream. But the prize is too splendid for prudence and fore-
sight to reject ; and the immediate efiect of its possession would give
such a semblance of overwhelming preponderance that the rest of
Europe could never see it with composure. The extension of the
Bussian Empire will be as menacing as was the extension of French
empire in tho days of Napoleon. And though his monstrous ambi-
tion was the certain prelude to the ruin of France, it was none the
less alarming to Europe. The possession of Constantinople, even
although it made certain the downfall of Busria, would not be less
dangerous for the season to the peace and freedom of the world.

At the same time the question of the Bosphorus is^one of those
which nature and man, history and geography, have combined to
render perplexed. On one side, as on the other, the case seems
unanswerable. On the one hand, when we look at it from the
Bussian point of view, the case stands thus : — ^A great power, which
iispires to foremost rank as a maritime nation, is so situated by nature
that its land opens both into the northern seas as well as into the
southern seas of Europe ; yet its fieet in the northern is locked in for
more than half the year by winter ice, and its fleet in the southern
seas is permanently locked in by public law. On the Black Sea she
commands a vast range of seaboard, with every appliance for naval

VOL. XX. N.S. 3 c

724

GROSS AND CRESCENT.

purpose — ^filne harbours, unequalled cruising-grounds, and a lavour-
able climate. Yet here she is cooped up by treaties and national
jealousies. Her Baltic fleet and arsenals are paralysed by winter ;
her Euxine fleet is paralysed by international ban. Mature and the
course of her history have given her in the Black Sea the grandest
naval station which the world can produce. She is burning to
develop and make use of its resources ; and she is forbidden to use it
by the suspicions of her neighbours. If in the depth of winter a
great crisis were suddenly to arise requiring Russia to despatch a
fleet for the instant protection of her world- wide interests, she has not
in Europe a single available arsenal from which to despatch it ; not
a single ship but what is dependent on hospitality for a roadstead.
Physically she might have a splendid fleet at Sebastopol, with
nothing between it and its intended destination; but European
treaties bar the way. As the Russians pointedly say, it is not so
much Constantinople they want as the free use of the Dardanelles.
And indeed we may wonder what would be the feelings of English-
men if they found all exit from the British Channel and St. George’s
Channel closed to them by fiat of their foreign rivals P

The case on the other hand seems no less unanswerable. If
Russian fieets issuing from the ports of the Euxine are to pass at
will down the Bosphorus, Constantinople becomes a subject city.
Constantinople is far more to Turkey than London is to England or St.
Petersburg to Russia ; and a navy which has free passage up and down
the Bosphorus could destroy it in an hour. It is clear that England
could not exist as a sovereign state if the French navies had absolute
freedom of sailing up the Thames, and if Parliament sat on the
issues of peace and war beneath the guns of foreign ironclads.
'Not would Russia be a free agent if the English fleet bad a right of
way up the Neva to the walls of the Czar’s palace. So that if Russia
is to have free access to the Mediterranean, ipso facto the existence of
Turkey is placed at her mercy. We all know how ptfecarious is the
independence of Denmark, and yet Copenhagen is not so much
exposed as Constantinople, is not so vital to Denmark, and is not at
the mercy of her one ancient enemy. The result is a dilemma only
too real and insoluble. Either a great state is to forego one of her
grandest physical advantages by sentence of her national rivals, or
the very existence of her ancient enemy is left to her simple good-
will.

Even this is but a small part of the difficulties that arise from the
unique geographical conditions of Eastern Europe. If we assume
the dream of Russian enthusiasts fulfilled, that Russia had simply
succeeded to the possession of Turkey, we should find her endowed
witifaL a power which would seriously threaten the rest of Europe. If

CB08S AiND GBESCEKT.

726

to the whole of the shores of the Euxine she united the Bosphorus, the
Propontis, and the Hellespont, and the shores and islands of Greece
and of the Archipelago, sho would simply possess a basis of maritime
war to which nothing else in the world can compare, and wLich would
far surpass all the other naval stations and resources of all the other
powers put together. She could easily make the Hellespont as
impassable to attack from the south, as if it were crossed by a break-
water of granite. Behind this impervious gate the Propontis and the
Euxine would form a station, compared with which all the stations
in the world are of trifling value, being port, arsenal, roadstead,
practising-ground, and naval station all in one; a vast natural
harbour, with its sally-port absolutely secure, within which fleets
could be built, equipped, trained, and exercised until the order was
given to sweep down the straits. If to this array of natural advan-
tages we add the opportunities of the countless islands and roadsteads
of the Levant, we get a combination of physical resources for naval
supremacy to which everything else in the world becomes quite
insignifleant.

The result is, that whether we turn to Bussia, or to Turkey, we
get a series of problems which have long defied a solution. On the
side of Turkey, is the chronic insurrection which its misgovemment
causes ; the difficulty of substituting another government except by
conquest ; the impossibility of tolerating the Ottoman rule ; the fact
that the Ottoman race can only bo dispossessed by war. On the
side of Bussia, is the agitation of the Bussian people, which has now
gone too far to be stemmed except by solid guarantees; the im-
minence of agitation to end in a crusade ; the certainty that the
Bussian navy cannot be permanently forbidden to pass the Bos-
phorus ; the prospect of Bussia’s ascendancy if sho holds it ; the
fear that new Bussian conquests may be merely a fresh danger to
their neighbours, and a fresh oppression to their subjects. It is
difficult to see what real gain it would be to the nations that lie
between the Fruth and Cape Matapan, to have the privilege of
swelling the Bussian conscription, of being harried to pay the
Bussian taxes. The rule of the Czar is not marked by capricious
injustice and periodical slaughter like that of the Sultan ; but its
pressure on the daily life of the peasant is almost as heavy, more
systematic, more far-reaching, more jealous in surveillance. Some
of the races of Turkey might, at least for a time, be gainers in
changing the Forte for the Czar — ^the peasants of Bulgaria, for
instance, if they were tom from their homes would not be burnt in
them, or not so often ; but the people of Boumania, Servia, and
G-reece, might be even worse off than they are. The gain at any
rate would be too doubtful to risk so vast an experiment. Besides,

3 c 2

726

CBOSS AXD CBE6GENT.

there is not the slightest evidence that these nations and races one
and all desire a Bussian Nirvana. And yet they might all go
together, if they go at all, home to the bosom of holy Bussia. And
when they had gone, we should have to await in the Catholic and
Mussulman races absorbed ; in the non- orthodox Churches persecuted;
in the Albanian mountaineers and the Greek democrats ; a new
catalogue of Polands and Circassias, more Warsaws, and more
deportations to Siberia.

All this is apart from the just alarm which would agitate Europe
to find the Eastern Mediterranean in the hands of a power so vast
and so restless as Bussia. Even if Austria 'could lie by and see
Bussia in possession of Bulgaria and Servia, if Germany could
consent to make the Danube a Muscovite river, if England could see
, unmoved, the fleets of the Czar riding in the Golden Horn, no one
can doubt that in the long run the simple accession to Bussia of the
whole of Turkey in Europe must involve a general and protracted
war. The possession of Eastern Europe and the Eastern sea en bloc
by any one power, and that power Bussia ; of the whole tract and
its seaboard from Sebastopol to Capo Matapan, from the Danube to
Crete ; of the islands, straits, and inland seas this space compre-
hends : — ^this is a supremacy so vast that it is the duty of Europe as a
whole, as it has ever been, to prevent it. It is not a matter of
English interests alone, or of the road to India. It concerns the very
existence of France, of Italy, of Austria, of England, as maritime
powers ; it must really disturb the dog-slumber of Prince Bismarck
himself. It is not, and it never should be represented as, a special
jealousy of the British flag. The cry of national selfishness — ^let the
Bussians seize Turkey, and we will seize Egypt — ^is the very thing
to invite the catastrophe, which is one common to all Europe. It is
a cause to be made a fixed point of European policy, in which
England may fairly take a leading part ; but which it would be
neither just nor wise that she should treat as her sole concern. And
if the Western Powers together cannot make this respected as a
cardinal point of their common policy, cannot guarantee it by policy
rather than by arms, it is idle to talk about statesmanship or public
law at all. It is quite within the duty and the traditions of all the
states of the West to 'say to Bussia : We will not permit you in
Europe a vast career of conquest, the consequences of which may be
so formidable to us all.

But when this general danger is provided for, there need be no
flying to arms at every step that is won by Bussia, or every step
that is lost by Turkey. A rigid adherence in politics to the old
moral rule— prtwctjpiw obsta — ^is not always a policy of wisdom. On
the contaary, the progress of events is so slow, is interrupted so

GBOSS AND OBESCENT.

727

often hy imcalculated chancesi that to be ever preventing dangers is
sometimes the surest way to produce them. A good policy has
often been ruined by pedantic adherence to its form, when its sub-
stance may be otherwise secured. It is in the nature of things that
Russia should advance at least for a time ; and it is in the nature of
things that Turkey should finally disappear. In this time of re-
settlement it may well be considered if Russia can be longer
debarred from the Dardanelles ; if some scheme for this object bo
beyond the reach of human skill. It would be the height of folly to
make a casm belli of any infringement of the integrity of Turkey.
Whatever else may have come of the events of the past year, at least
they have set aside the tradition of the old school — ^that the integrity
of the Ottoman Empire, as such, is any part of English policy. That
the Eastern Mediterranean should not be a Russian lake must be
the policy not only of England, but of all the Western states. That
the rule of the Sultan should bo stereotyped as it is, can be the policy
of no rational being. And it is stereotyped so long as it is the
uniform conviction of the East that England will not suffer encroach-
ment on the empire of Othman. The scheme which some still
cherish, which verbally at least was put in the Premier's notable
game of brag — that England must fight before the territory or the
sovereignty of the Sultan shall lose a jot — is a scheme of profligate
obstinacy. There are at least three grounds upon which it is finally
condemned. First : there is not the remotest chance loft for settling
the Eastern question without infringing the sovereign, if not the
territorial, rights of the Sultan. In the next place : to maintain
them by arms (if it could bo done) would destroy any hope of
improvement in his government ; would be directly perpetuating a
most infamous system. Thirdly : as a mere matter of force, it is
beyond the utmost resources of England to defend the Ottoman
crown intact. Things have come to that point, that Russia must
win some guarantees for the Christians of Turkey, or cease to be a
great power. Things have come to that point that the north-
western provinces of Turkey can no longer be kept under their
actual rule. And things have come to that state that the actual
rule of the Sultan is little more than chronic civil war.

There are thus three things at least which have to be dealt with —
the need to satisfy (without war) the just agitation in Russia ; the
need to restore peace to the provinces of Turkey ; the need to force
the Porte to change its system, or to reduce the area of its scandal-
ous misgovernment. It cannot be beyond the powers of human
wisdom to satisfy these three points; indeed, there are probably
several ways in which they may be more or less accomplished.
They are the avowed objects of Russia, and probably the real objects

728

OEOSS AKD GBESCENT.

of all the Western nations. In any scheme which seemed to secure
them, we have no longer to ask if it impaired the dominions and the
independence of the Forte. It is inevitable that any scheme should
do this : and it seems to be on all sides acknowledged. The
integrity and independence of the Forte, in the old Falmcrstonian
sense, now has no other meaning but protracted anarchy or gigantic
war — ^probably both together.

It is no part of our present purpose to consider any programme
whatever for securing these ends. On the contrary, we said at the
outset it is idle for journalists and essayists to attempt it. They are
matters for arrangement, and give and take, varying with the events
of the day and the resolves of certain persons ; and the means of
weighing the conditions and problems are possessed only by the
cabinets concerned. But the world outside can judge what are the
things to be sought, and what ere the dangers to be avoided. And
the dangers to be avoided would seem to be these. In securing the
protection of the Turkish subjects wo will do nothing — (1) To hand
over Turkey, directly or indirectly, to Bussia ; (2) To drive the
Turks to a war of desperation for their existence ; (3) To abandon
the Turkish provinces to simple anarchy and a war of races. Short
of this we will support anything that is really demanded by the
agitation in Eussia, by the opprehsion of the provinces and the mis-
govemment of the Forte. To those who call upon Europe to sweep
away the empire of the Forte, the simple answer suffices, that
Europe has nothiug to put in its place. It might be easy to destroy
the government of the Sultan by a joint attack on Constantinople ;
but to leave the rival races in presence of each other, and all in
presence of the Turks, still the strongest of all, and yet free to
regain their ascendancy by arms : this would indeed be a general
invitation to anarchy and bloodshed. To those who call upon us to
end all difficulties by welcoming the absorption of Turkey in Eussia,
the answer is that the gain does not seem to balance the cost. The
Eussion system of government is itself not so free from corruption,
barbarism, and oppression, that for the soke of spreading its blessings
wo need welcome a conquest which the races to be conquered do not
seem to desire, which would be a compound of crusade and spoilation,
and which would fill Europe with distrust and alarm. From all sides
we hear, and not least from Eussian liberals themselves, to what
lengths of venality, chicanery, and malversation the Eussian official
world has risen. From Foland and Siberia, from the Caucasus
and from Ehiva, comes the tale of ruthless ferocity with which she
has ever suppressed those who resist her. And from the days of
Catherine to the days of Kaiiffmann, history is red with the roll
of jnassacres which holy Eussia had perpetrated on the followers
of Mahomet.

CROSS Ain> CBESCENT.

729 .

OnVe for all we protest against a wdcome being given to a new
crusade on any pretext of indignation at. oppression and outrage.
AiLd a crusade it will be, if England abets [Russians nowin wreaking
on the Mussulman their ancient sectarian hate. The Russians at
this moment are seething with the fury of religious passion, a passion
which their rulers are unable to check, which they adopt os their
own most “ sacred mission.” If Russia is now launched upon Isbm,
it can only be in a reb'gious war ; a religious war it has already been
in Servia ; and a religious war it must yet more violently become,
with the one watchword of “ Down with the bloody Turk in the
name of the Cross.”

Wc trust that Englishmen may not abet a policy at once so
ludicrous and infamous, as a war for the extension of Christianity.
No doubt the wildest ianatic from a platform or a pulpit is not at
all prepared to advocate an extension of Christendom by the sword.
Bui, when all the pretexts are stript off, that is the real effect of
culling upon Russia to destroy the empire of the Turk. Men and
women who would shrink from the proposal to kill men because they
will not turn Christians, are calling upon Russia to drive the Turks
out of Europe on the ground that they are Mussulmans. When we
analyse the arguments for destroying the Turkish rule they always
rest on on ultimate basis of antipathy to Mahometan religion ; and
those who ore foremost in patting down this particular case of race
oppression are those who applaud the oppression of race elsewhere.

That it is not any special tenderness of humanity, no gr^at
political end by which they are stirred, is evident from the
fact that this cry of ” Down with the bloody Moslem,” comes mainly
from those who never trouble themselves about oppression and
massacre by Christie; who for the most part care nothing for
politics, or sec all politics through theological lenses. And
the very 'Christians who witnessed unmoved the iniquities of
Christian slaveholders, of opium wars, and Polish massacres, who
loudly exult over the slaughter of French infidels, and who thank
God that the Irish Catholics are slowly melting away, are ready to
charge all who decline to adopt their crusade with coldness of heart-
and sjrmpathy with oppression.

On this our ground is clear. We abhor all sorts and kiRds of
bloodshed and outrage, nor have we ceased to raise our voice against
all the injustice and cruelty which white men practise on black;
and Christians on pagans, Mussulmans, or Buddhists ; against the
mercantile aggressions of the uascrupulous trader; the wars of
ascendancy in aU parts of the world ; and the savage vengeance of
retrograde governments. We give their true names to all such
crimes. Nor have we been slack to make known our horror at

780

CBOSS AND. CEE8CEOT..

the crimes of Turkic oppression. We neither extenuate them! nor
seek to forget them. The imagination can conceive nothing more
enormous; nor is anything more certain than their cause — ^the
accumulation of misgovemment increasing through ages. ’But
when we are called on to put all other thoughts aside, to destroy tho
in&mous i^stmn by the sword, to avenge the crimes by overthrow-
ing the race amongst whom they were done, to open a new religious
war upon their faith — when men, some under the excitement of
religion, some under the spell of historical partizanship, and some
for the sake of a popular cry, ask us to declare four millions of men
enemies of the human race simply as Turks and as Mahometans,
outlaws who are to be hunted out of Europe in the name of Christ
and gmieral humanity — ^well, we who have not lost our heads decline
to act upon such impulse. We have no special sympathy with the
religion of Mahomet ; we are not blind to the :^t that *t is tho
most concentrated of all theologies, and we condemn theology alto-
gether. We are not slow to point to its vices, its absurdities, its
inhumanity (they ore those of theology made fierce and fanatical).
I7or do we pretend that Islam is the equal of that Christianity' on
which we stand, and out of the materials of which aU our hopes
have been built up. We are not blind to tho vices of Mussulman
life; but we say that the followers of the Prophet, even the
Turks in Europe, have still some noble qualities which we would
were more common among Christians. We see the ingrained
eorruption of the Ottoman role, and tho reckless barbarity with
which it is familiar; but we see corruption and barbarity, less
only in degree, on many sides about us, and we hesitate to believe
they will be cured by the general mel^e of war, and least of all by a
war of religion.

Fkedkric IIarkisox.

THE LAW OF HONOUE.

It used to be one of the most familiarly received of Historical anec-
dotes, that Francis the First of France, after his overthrow at Pavia,
wrote to his mother to say All is lost, save our honour.” The tale
is now discredited as a matter of fact ; but it is one of those talcs
which, if they are false, prove almost more than if they are true.
That such words should have been put into the mouth of a certain
man, that it should have been universally felt that, when put in
his mouth, they were in character, shows that the saying, though it
may bo historically false, is still dramatically true. Whether Francis
did talk about honour or not at one particular time, the currency
of the tale points to Francis as a man who would naturally have
talk about honour on his lips. And this at least dramatic truth
of the story suggests an important question. What is “ honour,”
what is its nature or its value, when Francis the First could lay
claim to it ?

It would perhaps have been possible to go back to an earlier period
of history for another example of the same difficulty. What can
be the nature, what can be the value, of that kind of virtue, that
form of good faith, which Avas systematically practised by William
Eufus ? Perhaps William Eufiis would not be so easily accepted as
Francis the First as the type of the honourable or chivalrous cha-
racter. William Eufus stands out in popular conception, as he does
also in sober truth, as one of the most hateful characters in English
or in any other history. He stands out as the oath-breaker, the
treaty-breaker, the man ghxn up to the foulest vices, the general
oppressor of every class, the man who, without a sigh of intellectual
scepticism, delighted to proclaim himself as the enemy and the blas-
phemer of the God in whom he had not ceased to believe. Such is
the common conception of the Eed King ; and it is a conception
which, as far as it goes, is fully borne out by the facts of his history.
But this side of him does not make up the whole man. Besides the
fact that William Eufus was, whenever he chose to be either, not
only a great captain but a great ruler, there is also some reason for
looking on him as the first recorded gentleman. He is certainly the
first recorded man by whom the doctrines of honour and chivalry
are constantly and os Wtatiously put forward as his ruling principles
of action. When we look more narrowly into the actions of the Eed
King, we see that they were guided by a law, though that law was
neither the law of God nor the law of his kingdom. The law of
Eufiis was the law of the knight and gentleman, the law of honour.

732

THE LA^ OF HONOUB.

Beckless both of justice and of mercy, ke was quite capable of
generosity. Beckless of his oaths to his people and of his treaties
with princes, when he pledged his word as “ probus miles — as- “an
officer and a gentleman “ — ^then he kept it faithfully.' "He not only
kept it himself, but he cast aside with scorn the suggestion that
a knight who had passed his word could ever break it. When
reproached with his repeated breaches of his promises to the nation
which had saved his crown for him, he answered that no man could
keep all his promises. But this one class of promises, promises
made in the character of knight and gentleman, Bufus always did
keep. The popular conception of his character leaves out this side,
the chivalrous side of it, just as the popular conception of Francis
the First dwells mainly on the chivalrous side of his character, and
puts out of sight its general blackness both as a man and as a king.
Francis is rather a popular character with ordinary readers of history,
while Bufus is certainly the opposite. But Bufus in his own day
seems to have had to some extent the same reputation as Francis.
Men who condemned his private and public crimes still half admired
the quality which in his own day was called his magnanimity. The
difference between the lasting reputation of the two kings is pro-
bably owing to the different relations in which each of them stood
to the received religion of his time. Francis, in the eyes of many
of his contemporaries, half atoned for his crimes and vices by the
merit of his religious persecutions. Bufus added to his crimes and
vices a form of irrcligion which was almost peculiar to himself.
Again, in doing wrong to all classes, he did wrong to churchmen
also, and churchmen had, in his age, the best means of making their
wrongs known to the world. That Francis was a patron of art and
literature, while Bufus bears no such charactOT, is a difference in the
times rather than in the men. The builder of the first Hall of West-
minster was a patron of art, as art was understood in his time. As
for literature, while in the days of Francis its patronage was the
fashion among kings and princes, in the days of Bufus the learned'
Henry stood out as something without a parallel in Western Europe.
Altogether, allowing for the difference of their times, the two men
were perhaps not quite so unlike as they seem at first sight. And
in the point with which I am now chiefly concerned they stand^ or
fall together. Each is a type of the man who has the formulas of
honour and chivalry on his lips. From their examples we may
^perhaps learn what honour and chivalry are really worth.
t What then is the real nature of the qualities called honour and
chival^ P What is the real character of the knight or gentleman,
who mak^ honour or chivalry his rule of actions P One thing strikes
net at first sight, that the word “honour’’ and the word “gentle*
man ” have both of them acquired rather singular secondary meon^

THE LAW OF HOKOUB.

738

ings. ^Honour is primarily the tribute of respect which man rec^ves
from others. In its secondary sense, it has come to mean a rule by
which a man guides his own actions, even when those actions are
not likely to bring him any honour. We should perhaps look on
conduct as spcciddy honourable, if it was done with a certainty
that it could never be known, and therefore could never be honoured.
Again, with regard to the man who is supposed to have a special
regard for honour, the knight or in more modern language the
gentleman, it is singular that a word which in itself simply means a
certain social rank should have come to be so completely identified
with certain moral or quasi-moTsl qualities. In itself, to say that a*
man is no gentleman is no more of an insult than to say that he is
no nobleman. Both propositions might equally express an un-
doubted fact as to a man’s rank in life. Yet there is probably no one,
however lowly his rank, who would not think himself insulted if he
were told that he was no gentleman. But to call a man by way
of insult no nobleman, would be so purely meaningless that the
phrase has most likely never been used by any one to any one.

Both these usages of language are instructive. They are far more
than mere caprices. It is quite certain that many people, when they
speak of honour as a rule of action, have no thought at all of
receiving honour as a reward for honourable actions. It is quite
certain that, in the use of the word gentleman,” the notion of mere
social rank is often quite forgotten. Men will often say, by way of
praise, of a man who is not a gentleman by rank, that his conduct
is that of a gentleman. They will call him one of nature’s gentle-
men ’’and the like. The point which is really instructive is that
words can be used in this kind of way. Words often depart widely
from the etymological meanings with which they started ; but they
commonly still carry some trace of those etymological meanings
about them. Honour ” could never have come to be spoken of as
a rule of conduct, a rule of conduct which, in particular cases, often
puts the opinion of others out of sight, unless that rule of conduct
had been first of all defined by the opinion of others, and by the
honour which others were likely to pay to those who acted
according to that opinion. ** Gentleman” could never get a
meaning almost irrespective of rank, if it had not in its first use
simply expressed rank, if it had not at the beginning marked out
men of a certain rank as the exclusive possessors of certain qualities.
If a tinker' shows delicacy of feeling, or any of the other qualities
which are supposed to distinguish the gentleman, and on the strength
of it the tinker is pronounced to be a gentleman by nature, those who
use such a phrase most likely take credit to themselves for altogeth^
ignoring artificial ranks. And so, in their own feelings for the
moment, they very possibly do. But the form of words which th^

THE LAW OF HONOUR.

734 *

use is none the less the strongest possible witness to the strictest
theory of artificial ranks. To say that the tinker is a gentleman by
nature implies a certain degree of surprise that the conduct by which
he earns that name should be found in any one who is not a gentle-
man by rank.

I have not the least doubt that not a few people will at once cry
out at this way of putting the matter. They will say that what they
mean by a gentleman is something irrespective of birth or rank.
They will say that many a man who is not a gentleman by birth or
rank is a gentleman by conduct, and that many a man who is a
gentleman by birth or rank is not a gentleman by conduct. They
do not see that such a way of speaking is the best proof of the truth
of what I am saying. The ideal gentleman by conduct, though he
may not in every case coincide with the gentleman by rank, yet
assumes the gentleman by rank as his starting-point. He is what
the gentleman by rank is not always, but what he always ought to
be. He is what the gentleman by rank ought to be, not in the
character of an honest man, a pious Christian, a good citizen, or any
other, but distinctly in his character of gentleman. The more
people try by using this kind of language to wipe out the distinction,
the more they assert the distinction, the more they assume the
gentleman by rank as a standard of conduct. That is to say, they
set up a certain artificial rank as a model, as a type — at least a pro-
bable type — of certain qualities, to which men of other ranks are
honoured by being compared. They would see the absurdity of
saying that a man acted like a duke, earl, baron, or baronet,
because duke, earl, baron, and baronet are confessedly mere artifi-
cial ranks. Sut ** gentleman is in its origin as purely on artificial
rank as any of the others. Only, as it happens to be the rank which
includes all the others, it is the one which has been taken as a
standard. We do not say that a man acts as a duke or a baronot,
because dukes and baronets are only varieties of the4arger class of
gentlemen, and it is in their general character of gentlemen that they
are all expected to act.

It is then, I say, the artificial rank of gentleman, the rank which
includes all higher artificial ranks, which is taken by a large class of
people as setting the standard of conduct. Every man of that rank
is expected as a matter of course to act in a particular way. If any
man of lower rank acts in the same way, it is a kind of work of
supererogation for which he deserves the special honour of being
coxfipared to the favoured rank, perhaps of being deemed to be
personally raised to it. It makes no difference that the artificial
rank of gentleman is not so ^sy to be defined now as it once was.
Defined or undefined, it is still assumed, assumed as a certain gtfast-
moral standard. Frank Gresham, the honest young squire in Mr.

THE LAW OP HONOUH.

735

Trollope’a novel, is most cliaracteristically made to say of the over-
bearing peer, Were he ten times Duke of Omnium, he cannot be
more than a gentleman, and, as a gentleman, I am his equal.’’
Frank Gresham, in such a state of mind, might well have gone on
to say that some dukes were not gentlemen, and that many men
below his own class of squire were gentlemen. And such language
might sound, and might be meant to sound, as not a little levelling.
In truth no language is more oligarchic and exclusive. A certain
artificial rank, whether that of duko or simple gentleman does not
matter, is set up as a quast-mor^ sbindard. If any others who do
not belong to that artificial rank are thought to have reached its
standard of conduct, their highest reward is to be received as
its adopted members. No way of speaking more distinctly starts
from the exclusive standing-ground of an artificial class.

Now if for “ gentleman ” we substitute any such form of words as
“honest man,” “good citizen,” “loyal subject,” “good Christian,”
or “ good Mussulman,” wc at once find ourselves in another range of
ideas. These various formula) have important differences among
themselves ; but they have one great point of at least negative agree-
ment. None indeed but the first simply contemplates man as man ;
all the rest contemplate man as a member of somo political or
religious society, bound to other members of that society by common
political allegiance or common religious belief. But they all agree
in this, that none of them has any reference to exclusive artificial
rank. Each name may with equal ease belong to the highest or to
the lowest rank. Our duke and our tinker may either of them be
honest man, good citizen, or good Christian, as either of them may
be the opposite. And in applying those names to either of them,
there is no paradox, no second intention, nothing of that peculiar
kind of meaning which is implied if we say that a particular duke
is not a gentleman or that a particular tinker is.

All this leads us up to the fact that there are at least four distinct
standards of human conduct, four distinct ways of looking at human
actions with the object of praise or blame. I do not mean that all
four are always kept distinct in practice. On the contrary, in a
great many cases all four prescribe exactly the same line of conduct,
and a man may often be sorely puzzled to say which he has followed
as his own guide in any particular case. Of these four standards — I
am far from saying that there may not be more than four ; but these
four they certainly are — ^tho first is that of abstract morality, the
doing or abstaining from a thing simply because it is right or wrong
in itself, without regard to any law or sanction of any kind.
Questions as to the origin of moral sentiments, whether they are
innate or revealed or the growth of hereditary habit, do not concern
me here. It is enough for my purpose that we have moral sent!-

736

THE LAW OF HONOtJE.

Eients, however we came by them. It is enough that, asi matter
of fact, men do sometimes act from a conviction that such a course
is right or wrong in itself, without thinking either of the law of the
land or of the law of Ood or of the opinion of other people. To
conduct coming under this head, conduct of which abstract right and
wrong is the standard, wo properly apply such words as virtuous,
moral, honest,* and the like. The outward acts may be exactly
the same as those which one or more of the other standards
would have prescribed ; but the motive is different. By virtuous
conduct, as we mean something which has no reference whatever to
the opinion of others, so we mean something which has just as little
reference to either civil or religious sanctions.

Another standard is conformity to the law of the land, the duty of
the good citizen, the loyal subject, or whatever else we may call him,
according to the diversities of forms of government. By this of
course I mean something quite different from mere submission to the
law through fear of the punishments which the law can inflict. I
mean obedience to the law strictly as a matter of duty, even though
punishment is not at all likely to follow on its breach ; I mean much
the same as what is implied in the scriptural phrase of obeying, not
only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.'^ Now it certainly is
difficult wholly to separate this standard of action either from the
moral standard on one side or from the religious standard on the
other. We can hardly conceive a man, careless of the moral standard,
careless of the religious standard, and yet strictly conforming to the
law of his own political society on some higher principle than that of
fear of punishment. As a rule, those who obey the law of the land
strictly and conscientiously do so because they hold such obedience to
be either a moral or a religious duty. Still obedience to the law of
the land is separable in idea both from the religious and the moral
standard. We can ideally conceive a man, though most likely no
such man ever existed, who strictly shaped his conduct according
to the law of the land, without any reference to any standard beyond
it. And, at all events, the law of the land does often prescribe a
course of action which would not be obligatory according to either
of the other standards taken alone.

The third standard is the religious one. According to this
standard, the course of action to be followed is determined, neither by
an abstract sense of right nor by the provisions of the law of the
land, but by a law which is supposed to have been put forth by

(1) Etymologically “honest” and "honourable” aro the same thing. Both camo
item “honor,” and ^at, philologers tell us, is the same as “onus.” And in the English
of a few oentiiries back, the use of the two words was not so distinct as it is now.
Bat in modem usage it is plain that the two words have quite different meanings, and
i/lml &ey severally belong to distinct standards of action according to the ^vision
which 1 have laid down.

THE LAW OP HONOUB.

737

divine autbority. For my purpose there is no need to seek for cases
either in extinct religions or in living religions which arc far away
« from our ordinary experience. I need not go beyond the range of the
great monotheistic religions, Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan.
These all agree in setting forth conformity to the divine will as their
standard of action. They prescribe obedience to a law ; but it is to
a law put forth by a divine and not by a human lawgiver, a law
whose sanctions are to be found, not in this world but in another.^
But, just as in the case of the good citizen or loyal subject conform-
ing to human law, something more is meant than mere conformity
to the divine will for fear of divine vengeance. I conceive that any
teacher of Judaism, Christianity, or Mahometanism, in any of their
higher forms, would say that the good Jew, the good Christian, or
the good Mussulman was bound to conform to the divine will simply
as the divine will, without regard to consequences. And such a
teacher would, I conceive, add that conformity to the divine will in
no way takes away the duty of conformity to the abstract standard
of right, though he would probably add that it was part of the divine
attributes that the divine will should be the highest manifestation of
abstract right.

Now it will, I think, be plain without any argument to prove it
that the standard of action set up by the knight, the gentleman, tho
chivalrous man, the man of honour, is something different from any
of these three. His ideal is clearly different from that either of tho
purely moral man, of the good citizen, or of the good Christian.
And I think that we may safely say that it differs more widely from
any one of those three than any one of those three differs from the
other two. This ideal is in short conformity to a fourth standard,
the so-called Law of Honour. As in the case of the other three
standards among themselves, the actions prescribed by the law of
honour will often be the same as those which are prescribed by some
or all of those three standards. But the motive for doing them is
more palpably distinct from the motives which belong to any of tho
other three standards than any of those motives are from one another.
It is not merely that the law of morals, the law of the land, and the
law of God, agree more nearly with each other in the course of
action which they prescribe than either of them agrees with tho law
of honour. The difference of motive stands out more palpably. A
mai^ really may not know which of the other standards led him to a
certain action ; as soon as the feeling of honour comes in, the dis-

(1) The fact that in the earliest Hebrew records there is no reference to a future
state of rewards and puni^ments does not here concern me. Judaism, in the form
which it has taken at least from the time of the Bab3*loniBh CaptiTity^, clearly relies
on the sanctions of another world, just as much as Christiauity or Mahometanism. The
Sadducee may in truth have been an Old Hebrew, but he was a heretic in the eyes of
the dominant orthodoxy of the Pharisee.

738

THE LAW OF HONOUE.

tinction makes itself quite conscious. Morals, law, religion. We all
closely intertwined together ; honour stands apart, distinct from all,
sometimes hostile to all. We do not expect the law of the land to
enforce every point of morals by legal sanctLons ; but we do expect
that it shall not ordain anything immoral.^ If the law of any
country does ordain anything immoral, we pronounce the law of that
country to be so far evil, to be so far, in the phrase of our fore-
fathers, unlaw. So again, we expect any system of religion, not only
"to ordain nothing immoral, but actually to enforce every point of
morality as a religious duty. If it docs otherwise, we say either that
that religion is so far false in itself or else that its teaching has been
misunderstood on that particular point. 13ut the law of honour is not
in the least expected to enforce every point of morals. It is not even
expected to forbid all conduct that is contrary to the standard of
morals. Indeed we are not very much surprised if it in some cases
prescribes conduct which morals, law, and religion agree in con-
demning. The object of the other three standards is to supply, each
within its own range, a complete standard of conduct. Each pro-
fesses to keep things in a certain harmony, to moderate and regulate
all the tendencies and impulses which make up human nature, so
that no virtue shall be exalted at the expense of others. Any moral
or religious code which so sets up one virtue as to be careless about
others, we pronounce to be imperfect on the face of it. But this is
what the law of honour does in its. own nature. It picks out a few
particular virtues and is careless about the others. In so doing it
goes far to turn its favourite virtues into vices ; and there have been
times and places ivhcre it has prescribed conduct which is positively
vicious.

And, more than this, there is always a lurking, sometimes an
open, hostility between the standard of honour as a motive and the
motives which are supplied by the other three standards. Honour is
very often distinguished from law, and put in opposition to it.
Sometimes it puts on the air of something nobler and finer than law,
as something which goes beyond law and follows more excellent ways
than law prescribes. Sometimes it comes into direct collision with
law ; and, when it does so, the man of honour will commonly say

(1) I Bay to wdain nothing immoral. This is the clear duty of every commonuroalth.
Eat it is equally clear that it is not necessarily the business of any commonwealth
directly to puni^ vice as such. 1 say <'not necessarily,” because one might conceive
very simple forms of society in which the state might rightly reward virtue as virtue,
and punish vice as vice. And I say << directly,” because, though it is not necessarily
the duty of a commonwealth to punish vice as such, its legislation should clearly be, as far
as possible, directed to the encouragement of virtue and the discouragement of vice. But
the immediate and necessary business of every commonwealth is, not to punish vice
as sia offence against morality, but to repress vice when it becomes crime against the
xsdmnkon good. Morality forbids a man to get drunk, even quietly in his own house ;
hut he does not become a proper object for state punishment until, by going out into
the public road, he makes his dEunkenness disgusting and dangerous io others.

THE LAW OF HONOUR.

789

that law mu^t go to the wall And what is true of the conflict
between honour and law is also true of the conflict between honour
and either religion or morals. The man of honour, the man who
makes honour his chief standard of action, will very often, as I have
said, do exactly the same things^ as the moral man, the good citizen,
or the religious man. But he vdll in some cases do things which all
of them will condemn ; and, even when he acts as any of them would
act, he acts from a motive which is distinctly different from any of
theirs. Nay more, he is apt to look down it^on any of their standards
as something low, dull, prosaic, unworthy of so exalted a being as
himself. Threaten the mere man of honour, the man who always
has honour and not right upon his lips, with an appeal to the law of
the land, and it is at once seen how between the standard of honour
and the standard of law there is a real and inherent, though not
always open, antagonism.

Now what is this standard of honour, this law of the knight,
the gentleman, the chivalrous man, which stands in so many respects
apart from the law which binds the virtuous man, the good citizen, or
the religious man ? The difference is expressed in the name : the
standard of the other three is in all cases submission to law of one
kind or another. It is obedience to real authority of some kind ;
whether the authority of our own consciences, of the commonwealth of
which we are members, or of the religion which we profess to. believe.
But the standard of honour is submission, not to law but to opinion.
It is submission, not to any real authority, but to something of the
man’s own setting up. It is in truth not submission to a law binding
on all, but merely deference to the opinion of a particular class. Its
sanction is not the approbation of a man’s own conscience, not
the punishment inflicted by a temporal or an eternal ruler, but dis-
honour, disgrace, the bad opinion of men, in truth the bad opinion
of some particular class of men. The honourable man is he who acts
in that way which in*th^ opinion of the class to which he belongs is
held to be deserving of honour. The punishment which he fears is the
loss of honour, that is, the loss of the good opinion of that class;

It follows therefore that there may be many standards of honour,
according as different lines of conduct may, among different classea
of people, be held to deserve honour. Thus there is said to be, and i
do not doubt that there is, such a thing as ‘^honour among thieves.”
But what we are now practically concerned with is that form
of the law of honour which takes as its standard the opinion of the
class known as gentlemen. The man of honour, as far as we are
concerned with him, is he who does that which is held among
gentlemen to be worthy of honour, and abstains from doing that
which is held among gentlemen to be worthy of dishonour. His
standard is the opinion df gentlemen ; his sanction is the’ fear of
losing the approval of gentlemen. That is to say, the standard of

VOL. XX. K.s. 3 n

740

THE LAW OP HONOUR.

honour is a class standard ; it is one which is not, like morality,
law, and religion, open to all men ; it is confined to the class of
gentlemen. It belongs only to those who belong to that class
by birth and haye done nothing to forfeit their privilege of birth,
or else to those who have, so to speak, been in some way chosen into
that class from other classes. It belongs exclusively to a class which
undoubtedly has many and great merits, but which no less undoubt-
edly leaves a large mass of moral, religious, and law-abiding people
outside its pale. It is a standard which has undoubtedly changed
a good deal at difierent times, and its most modem changes have
commonly been for the better. That is to say, the law of honour
has in many points drawn nearer to the law of conscience ; we may
indeed suspect that in some cases the word honour has sunk into a
mere formula, and that men have really been guided by conscience
in their hearts while they have had the name of honour on their
lips. Still, even now, the law of honour and the law of conscience
are clearly distinct from each other, and there have been times in
which they have been much more distinct than they are now. But
in all times the law of honour has followed the standard which has
been fixed by the class of gentlemen for the time being. By what-
ever degrees the standard of the gentleman comes nearer to the
standard of the honest man, so much the better for the gentleman.
But the two standards still remain distinct in idea. As I have
already said, morality, law, religion, and honour will often pre-
scribe exactly the same course of action ; they will in fact prescribe
the same course of action whenever law, religion, and honour have
not gone astray. But the four classes of motives still remain distinct,
and the motive of honour still retains its peculiar characteristic of
starting from the special standard of one particular class of men.

This then is the great and essential difference between the other
three standards and the standard of honour. The other three aro
universal ; the standard of honour is parti(|l, *and what some people
call sectional. Morality requires of every man the practice of everj’'
virtue. So does every form of religion which discharges one main
duty. of religion, that of enforcing morality by fresh, sanctions. So
does the law of the land, so far as it is concerned with the matter.
It may not enforce every virtue by penal sanctions, because to enforco
virtue as virtue is no part of its business ; but any legislation that
deserves the name requires all classes of subjects or citizens alike to
obey the rules which it lays down for the common good of. all. But
what the law of honour teaches is, not that all men should practise
all virtues, but that certain classes of men should practise certain
virtues. The moral and the religious code aim at absolute moral
«g^eotion. iNo one of course ever reached absolute moral perfection ;
"^t he who really aims at it at least gets*so near to it that he does
not wiBingly acquiesce in imperfection. But the law of honour does

THE LA.W OE HONOUB.

741

not eyen*aim at moral perfection ; it willingly acquiesces in imperfec-
tion ; if certain arbitrarily chosen yirtues are practised, it is careless
as to the practice of the others. As the standard of honour has
changed at different times, so the virtues chosen, and the definition
of those virtues, have differed at different times. But, speaking
generally, wo may say that the law of honour, as such, has commonly
been satisfied if men practise the virtues of courage and truthfulness,
and if women practise the virtue of chastity. To say this is no
doubt taking an ideal standard ; it is putting the law of honour at
its very best ; there certainly have been times and places when the
word honour has been largely on men’s lips, but when this standard
has been far from being reached or oven aimed at. But that this is
the ideal standard of the law of honour is plain from common usages of
language. A woman’s honour always means her chastity.^ A man’s
honour means either his courage or his truthfulness. So with the
opposite phrases ; a woman’s dishonour means her unchastity. Those
are the primary meanings of the words honour and dishonour as
applied to a woman ; if they are applied to her practice of any other
virtues or vices, it is in a kind of secondary way. So a man’s dis-
honour always implies some broach of the law either of courage or
of truthfulness in some shape or other. Ho is dishonoured by
running away in battle ; he is dishonoured by an intentional fraud ;
he is not dishonoured by conduct of other kinds which the moralist
looks on as at least equally bad. As for the point of truthfulness as an
element in honour, wo shall perhaps find, if we look into the matter
very minutely, that a man’s honour is primarily his courage, that it
is his truthfulness only secondarily, in those cases in which it needs
courage to be truthful. Or perhaps it is truthfulness when truth is
pledged in the special character of a man of honour, as in the partial
truthfulness of William Hufus. It is certainly not truthfulness in
exactly the same sense in which truthfulness is prescribed by abstract
morality. It might be oti extreme case when Francis the First, the
other pattern of honour, is reported to have said — again it matters
little whether he really said it or not — ^that he had never lied excqit
to women. He forgot indeed to add the cases in which he had
betrayed princes and commonwealths which trusted in his good

(1) In common Bpoech too her ** virtue*’ has exactly the same meaning;. A ivoman
who was guilty of every kind of vice except unchastity would by many people be
caUed ** strictly virtuous.*’ This may be because, on any diowing, chastity is the most
distinctive and characteristic female virtue. But it rather" comes of an euphemistic
way of speaking, like that odd perversion of words by which many people apply the
words ** moral,” ** immoral,” ** morality,” and the like, to one Glass of virtues and
vices only. Certain it is ^at ** virtue ” applied in this sense does not exactly answer
to ^'honour ” applied in the same sense. For there is no male equivalent^ as there is
in the case of ** honour.” We sometimes hear of a man’s ** virtue giving way” and
the like, commonly in cases of temptation by the offer of money, promotion, or some-
thing of that kind. But here the word seems to be used in a secondary sense, by a
metaphor borrowed from the " virtue ” of a woman.

3d 2

742

THE LAW OF HONOXJE.

faith ; but this again was the mere prosaic duty of a king; not the
more poetical and sentimental business of a man of honour. So in
Captain Marryat’s novch Peter Simple says of Captain Kearney,
who was given to lying in the form of romantic stories, “ He would
not tell a lie, that is such a lie as would be considered to disgrace a
gentleman.’’ O’Brien answers, All lies disgrace a gentleman.” But
perhaps Peter was right ; it is not every kind of lie which disgraces
the gentleman as such. O’Brien, though he used the word “ gentle-
man,” was unconsciously supplementing the standard of honour by
the standard of morality. But even if we define the standard of
honour so as to take in all truthfulness, it is still only a partial
standard. Chastity in the one sex, courage and truthfulness in the
other, are admirable qualities us far as they go. But they do not by
themselves make up the whole of moral perfection.

The weak point of the law of hmiour then is that it does not cover
the whole range of right and wrong, but that it picks out certain
virtues for exclusive, and therefore exaggerated, cultivation. I say
exaggerated cultivation, because, though, in the strict sense, the
exaggerated cultivation of any virtue is impossible, yet the exclusive
cultivation of any virtue practically comes to its exaggeration. As
a matter of addition and subtraction, no one can be too brave, too
chaste, or too truthful.^ As a matter of proportion, it is easy to be
too much of any of the three. That. is to say, a man may give to
those virtues such an exclusive regard as to be careless about all
others. He may so pique himself on the particular virtue which he
does practise as to moke it practically a vice. And this is what the
law of honour tends to. The honourable man and the virtuous
woman, according to the narrow standard of honour and virtue, may
be really as far from that harmony of virtues which make up moral
perfection as men and women who may have gone astray on the
points in which they have kept right, but who may be their
moral superiors on some other points.* And it is curious contradic-
tion that the virtue which the law of honour specially enforces on one
sex is not enforced by it on the other. The man who brings a
woman to dishonour is not thereby necessarily dishonoured himself.

(1) Xo man can be too brave ; he may be too daring. The bravo Tnan is the man
who is daring at the right times and places and at no others. He is thus distinguished
from the coward, who is not daring at the times and places where he ought to be, and
from the foolhardy man, who is daring at the times and places where he ought not to
be. So no man or woman, married or unmarried, can be too strict in observing the
real law of chastity. But the conduct by which some of our early kings and Queens
won the honours of saintship was no following of the real law of chastity, but was as
distinot a broach of moral duty as any act of unchastity.

(2) This must be taken with the qualification that, in all times and places, those who
fly directly in the fiice of the standard of their own time and place, who fail in the

•particular virtues which that standard specially insists on, often receive a general moral
shock which is likely to make them go wrong in other points also.

THE LAW OF HONOUE.

743

A tbousdnd anecdotes might be told to show the distinction between
the conventional law of honour and the eternal law of conscience on
this and on other points. When Admiral Herbert l^old James the
Second that his ** honour and conscience would not allow him to
pledge himself to vote for the repeal of the Tost Act, the king
answered, “ Nobody doubts your honour, but a man who lives as you
do ought not to talk about his conscience.” ^ James herein showed
singular ignorance of human nature on more than one point ; ^ but
his words imply what is certainly true, that a man who is careless
about many of the duties imposed by conscience may be strictly
scrupulous about those among them which are also imposed by
honour. More than one page in our criminal annals will supply
us with instructive instances of the working of honour as, so to
speak, a kind of local conscience. Criminals of a higher rank than
usual have been known to talk about their honour almost at the
moment of their crimes. It would be easy to quote several in-
stances, older and newer, in the case of various kinds of offences,
forbidden by morality, but seemingly not forbidden by honour.
Some people may think that such men are shamming. It is far
more likely that they are not shamming at all. It is perfectly
possible that their code of honour did not condemn tho^e particular
ends, but that it did condemn certain other acts. It is quite
possible they might be as safely trusted not to do those acts which
their code of honour did condemn as a really virtuous man might
be trusted not to do the acts which they do. The faith of such a
man, pledged as “ probus miles,” like that of William Bufus, would'
very likely have been strietly kept. Such an argument in no way
proves anything in extenuation of the doings of the honourable”
perpetrators of any crime ; it only shows how very imperfect the
code of honour is, and with what ugly departures from the common
law of morals it is quite consistent.

Now when cases of this kind arc set before any one who is in the
habit of talking about honour, he will and very likely at once cry
out that such mftn are not specimens of the real man of honour,
that their standard of honour must be a false one, and that his
own standard of honour is something quite different from theirs.
And when you ask him what his standard of honour is, he will often

(1) Macaulay, “ History of England,” ii. 208.

(2) Herbert’s answer was a good one. ** To ibis reproach, a reproach which came
with a bad grace from the lover of Catharine Sedley, Herbert manfully replied :
* I have my faults, sir ; but I could name poopld who talk much more about conscience
than I am in the habit of doing, and yet lead lives as loose as mine.' *’ Yet there
is no reason to doubt that both James and Herbei't did act from conscience on some
points, however much they may havo disobeyed their consciences on other points.
There is no greater mistalco than, because a man's conscience acts only partially or
because he obeys it only partially, to fancy that ho has no conscience at all.

744

TB® LAW OF HONOUB.

tell you something which pretty wdl takes in the practice of every
moral virtue. With such a standard of honour there is no fault to be
found, except that it is a pity to give it a false name. If honour
implies the practice of all morality, why not call it morality and not
honour? But the truth is that William Eufus and his later
followers are historically right, and that the man whose honour is
co-extensive W'ith morality is historically wrong. The law of
honour, as imdcrstood by William Eufus, is the real original law of
honour ; what the other man calls by the same name is not the law
of honour, but something a great deal better, to which he would do
well to give its real name. We sometimes ask what is meant by a
true gentleman,” and we get for answer a description of a man who
is morally perfect. If so, why give him a false name P Why not
call him the honest man that he really is P Such a portrait may be
the portrait of a virtuous man in any time or place ; it is not the
portrait of the historic ** gentleman ” at the time when gentlemen
first began to be heard Of. The truth is that the law of honour, the
standard of the gentleman, is, in its origin, the law of an exclusive
and overbearing military oligarchy. It is the law of William Eufus
and of men like William Eufus. It is the law which binds, not men
as men, not citizens as citizens, but members of an exclusive order
as members of that exclusive order. Its standard is the opinion of
that order ; its code, the law of honour, proscribes what is deemed to
be worthy of honour by the opinion of that order. It prescribes
certain forms of courage, certain forms of truthfulness, often such
fantastic forms as to go far towards turning those virtues into vices.
I have always specially delighted in the story of the knight who, for
love of his lady and in discharge of his vow, rode up and drove his
spear into the gate of the enemy^s castle, and who, as he went back,
having thus gloriously preserved his honour, was cut down by the
plebeian hands of a butcher. Hero is chivalry developed to the point
of lunacy. The man is not even rash or foolhardy ; for ifishness or
foolhardiness may consist either in miscalculation or in yielding to a
mere impulse of ^ring. He simply goes, for the sake of his honour,
to do a thing which is the act of a madman and of no one else. He
is not a good soldier ; for the duty of a good soldier is to do all that
in him lies, according to his degree, to advance the enterprise on
which he is engaged. But the taking of the castle was in no way
advanced by the knight running his lance into the gate. All that he
did was to risk, and to lose, for no purpose a life which might have
hem useful for the business in hand. This kind of thing is genuine
chivalry ; it is the fantastic notion of honour, the grotesque distor-
tion of the two isolated virtues of courage and truthfulness, carried
to itsiUtural developement. This is chivalry ; this is the carrying
«> out of the standard of tbe chivalrous class, the class who go to battle

THE LAW OP HONOTJE.

745

on horses and despise those who go on foot. We must not have the
name of chivalry transferred from pranks like these to which it really
belongs to actions which deserve much better names. I have heard
the name chivabous ” applied to such deeds as that of Sir Philip
Sidney when he bade his friends give the water to the other wian
rather than to himself. Put that was not chivaby ; it was something
much better, Christian self-denial. Nor was tWe any chivalry in
such an act as that, which, in different forms, is told of David,
Alexander, and several other captains, how they refused to drink water
or enjoy some other luxury which their men could not share with
them. Such an act might spring from a mere generous impulse ; it
might spring from a noble and far-seeing policy, or from some
compound motive in which those two elements are inextricably mixed
together. But there is nothing in it of chivalry, nothing of the
fantastic class-feeling to which that name really belongs. Chivalry
is not the virtue of the soldier ; it is not the virtue of the general.
It is the fantasy of a class of men, of a class of soldiers, who are led
by it to do things which are no part of their duties, either as men or
as soldiers. The knight who was killed by the butcher may have had
it written on his tomb that he carried out the character of a man of
honour to the last. Compare this with the true standard of military
virtue. On the tomb of the three hundred at Thermopylai it was not
written that they had done anything as men of honour. It was
written that they lay there in obedience to the Laws of Sparta.^

The standard of chivaby then, the standard of honour, the standard
of the knight and gentleman, is not only at its best very imperfect,
but it is apt to run into vagaries which have no ground either in law
and morals or in common sense. But more than this, it is apt
to become positively wicked. As a purely class feeling, prescribing
at its best only those virtues which are thought becoming in an
exclusive class, it naturally led to utter recklessness towards all who
did not belong to that class. The contempt of the gentleman for the
rotiirwr, his recklessness of the rights of the roturie)*, were the. natural
offspring of the chivabous standard. It is with a feeling of pride
that one has to use a French word to express one’s meaning on this
subject. The English tongue has no words to express an idea the

(1) I have purposely chosen an illustration from a people among whom there was in
some points a near approach to the standard of honour. The Spartan standard was a
rfftaa standard, the standard of the full Spartan citizen, as distinguished from the Helot
or even the Ferioikos. And it was a standard which was largely enforced by opinion ;
nowhere were honour and disgrace more keenly felt than at Sparta. But there was
this wential difference between Spartan honour and the honour of chivalry, that .
Spartan honour was strictly measured by the standard of the law of the land, while the
honour of chivalry is careless about the law of the land, and may be actually opposed
to it. It was never written on the tomb of any chividrous hero that he died in strictly
conforming to an Act of Parliament. But something which exactly answers to sndi
a formula was written on the tomb of the Three Hundred.

746

THE LAW OF EOHOUB.

full deyelopement of which was never known in England in ‘the very
wori^t times. Chivalry and the class distinctions which are in-
separable from it, the distinctions out of which it rises and which it
continues, spring out of something most foreign to law ; but in many
lands they have drawn law over to their side and have established
those distinctions by law. But the boast that the law of England
has never recognized gentlemen,’’ though it perhaps goes a little too
far in the letter, is not untrue in the spirit. It is certain that wo
have had less of chivalry and its follies than most other Western
countries. A number of circumstances helped to keep chivalry in
England in some degree of order. With us the gentleman might
give himself endless airs, and might do some real mischief ; but other
classes had, in the very worst times, better protection against him
than they had anywhere out of the Forest Cantons. The full
developement of chivalry comes out in one side of the Black Prince.
He shows an ostentatious deference to a royal captive ; he spares and
honours the knights who fight valiantly against him ; he slaughters
unarmed citizens without regard to age or sex. This is true
chivalry ; courtesy and deference towards men of a particular rank,
brutal contempt for all others. That was one side of Prince
Edward ; in a French prince it would most likely have been the
whole of him. But Edward, chivalrous in Franco and Aquitaine,
came back to England to act a part better than that of chiA'^alry, to
work for the real interests of his country in the more prosaic
character of a peer of Parliament. *

Again, when the law of honour really Avas the law of honour,
when men went wild about fancied points of honour, the natural
consequences followed. When honour was wounded, blood must be
shed to avenge it. Duelling, in the latest form of it which many of
us can remember, was bad enough; the “affair of honour” was a
foul breach of law and morals. Still the more modern duel was a
comparatively harmless survival from the times when'^the finished
gentleman was always fighting and killing somebody, and some-
times killing people without even the ceremony of fighting. The
chivalrous ages, the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, as
they were ages specially rich in adulteries, were also ages specially
rich in murders. The knight of romance, the knight who never
existed, may be a very noble character ; but go to the courts of the
successive Valois to see what the chivalrous knight was in real life.
In 'England we were never quite so bad as that, simply because in
England the chivalrous idea never had its own way quite so unre-
strainedly.

The fact is that the chivalrous idea is one which arose in times
wheli two classes of men went far to divide the rule of the world
between them. The knight with his class standard of chivalry

THE LAW OP HONOUB,

747 .

exactly answered to the monk with his class standard of ^sanctity.
The monk, like the knight, picked out some particular virtues for a
distorted degree of admiration which almost turned them into vices.
Of course the knight and the monk picked out quite different
virtues ; but in both cases there is the same imperfect moral
standard, the same failure to grasp the harmony of the whole moral
character. Kow monks did a vast deal of good in their time, and
knights did some ; but they generally did it by doffing the character
of knight or monk for the time. The monk who taught or civilized
or reclaimed wastes or did any kind of good to other people — all
which many monks did in the very highest degree — was in truth
not acting at all in his proper character of a monk. The immediate
object of the monk is, not the spiritual or temporal advantage of
others, but what might be called a selfish anxiety for the well-being
of his own soul. The monks were teachers and civilizers in so far
as they ceased to be monks, though at the same time it is perfectly
true that it was only their position as monks which enabled them to
act as teachers and civilizers. And so, without picking out cases
of extraordinary virtue like Saint Lewis, many a man of chivalrous
times and with his head full of chivalrous ideas, did a great deal of
good in whatever proportion he ceased to bo chivalrous. So far as
he stepped beyond the cliunncd circle, so fur as he showed disinter-
ested courtesy or kindness to any one of a rank below his own, so
far he departed from the cliivalrous standard to follow the higher
standard of right. Jlilonks and knights did not become so wholly
monks and knights but that they remained men, often good and
useful men. And the monastic and chivalrous ideals never could
divide mankind between them while such an important place was
held by the burghers and the secular clergy, two classes of men who,
with plenty of faults and with no lack of exclusive class feeling,
still kept up the dominion of law and common sense in opposition to
the fantastic standards at each end. Those two fantastic standards
had not only an analogy ; they had a real affinity to each other.
Many a knight at the end of his days tried to make his soul by
turning monk. To pass from the chivalrous extreme to the monastic
extreme was easier than to stay in the world and to live the life of
an honest and peaceable man in the world.

But it will be asked, how does all this bear on modem notions of
honour and the standard of the modern gentleman P First of all,
it may be answered that honour and chivalry in the true ' sense, in
the bad or exclusive sense, are even now far from being dead.
Duelling, the direct and characteristic offspring of the chivalrous
spirit, the open and deliberate flying in the face of a]} law and all
morals, is extinct in England, but it has not been extinct so very
long, and it is by no means extinct throughout the civilized^ world.

748

HIE LAW OF HONOUB.

And, as long as it exists among anj oiyUized people, so long is the
false standard of honour, honour as distinguished from, often opposed
to, law and morals, a thing not of the past but of the present. And
there is undoubtedly a large class of people who have a standard of
honour, a standard of the gentleman, which is certainly very differ-
ent from any standard of abstract morals, and which commonly
piques itself on a certain contempt for the law of the land. There
are many in whose eyes it would certainly be set down as showing a
lack of gallantry and high spirit to respect an Act of Parliament as
an Act of Parliament, and to set obedience to it before obedience to
some conventional rule. There are still those in whose mouths the
words honour” and ” gentleman” always suggest something exclu-
sive, something overbearing. And this standard of honour and
gentleman is the real historical standard ; those who follow it are
the true modern representatives of William the Ked and Bichard
the Lion-hearted. But, as I before said, there are many who use
the same words in a fur better sense, in whose mouths ” honour ”
seems simply to be another name for "right,” and " gentleman ” to
be simply another name for a virtuous or honest man. A man is
said to have " acted like a gentleman,” when he has simply done
what a true standard of morality would declare to be the duty of a
man of any rank. For instance, it is often held to be a special sign
of a gentleman to show regard to the feelings of others, especially to
the feelings of {)ersons below his own rank. It is a kind of climax
of gentlemanly behaviour to do nothing which shall offensively
remind the inferior of his inferiority. Now the man who can do
this certainly does something which is in every way admirable.
But in truth he is following a standard which is the exact opposite
of the historical standard of the gentleman. He is practising in the
highest degree the moral virtues of kindness and courtesy — ^for true
courtesy, as distinguished from conventional fripperies, is a moral
virtue — ^but he is doing the exact opposite to what Ule "probus
miles ” of chivalrous days would have done. The courtesy of the
"probus miles ” extended only to the men and women of his own
rank. It does not follow that he was always cruel or harsh to his
inferiors, though he lay under great temptations to become so.
He might be kind to a peasant, as he might be kind to a dog ; but
he would perhaps sooner think the dog than the peasant entitled to
equal rights with himself.^ Courtesy, the courtesy which makes
a temporary equality, towards any of the excluded classes, was
simply impossible. It was well if mere lack of courtesy was all. I
have seen somewhere, though I cannot lay my hand on the place,
some one in Froissart’s age described as " a very cruel man ; he

lione if a gentieman,” fays William Mallet ia Lord Lyttoa’s Hsndd ; **
nor if the fentimeiit either out of oharaeter or wholly untrue.

THE LAW OP HONOUK.

749

thought no more of killing a gentleman than of killing a peasant.’^
This may be mere exaggeration or caricature ; but it is the exaggera-
tion or caricature of a real feeling.

In short the gentleman^ in that common modern use of the word
in which the gentleman is hardly to be distinguished from the
virtuous man, is no representative of the historic gentleman of
chivalrous times. He does not belong to the school of William
Bufus or Francis the First, but to a school which is a great deal
better. Even if he makes honour and not morals his standard, the
difference will be mainly in the standard, not in the course of action
which the standard prescribes. And very often, if you examine into
his notion of honour, it really cannot be distinguished from con-
science or morals, even though he may sometimes shrink from
talking about conscience or morals. That a name which first
meant such an one as William Bufus should come to express so
different a character is a curious piece of survival. An exclusive
military aristocracy set the standard. Other people thought it
fine to be called by their name and to have their actions compared
to theirs. And in England, where the distinction of the gentleman
was wholly social and not political, the barrier of exclusiveness was
more easily broken down. Manners softened; exclusiveness was
weakened; as the class of gentlemen was less and less strongly
marked, the standard of the gentleman departed further and further
from the original standard. But through all changes the name has
gone on, till, in many mouths, it has lost all trace of its original
meaning, and has come to mark, not so much the fact of a particular
social rank as the possession of particular moral qualities. On the
other hand, there still are other uses of the word which do very
distinctly remind us of its origin. But the further the gentleman
goes away from the ideas which originally attached to his name, the
nearer does he come to the higher standard of the honest man.

Burke, as all the world knows, complained that the age of chivalry
was past. Perhaps, even according to his idea of chivalry, there was
no great reason to lament that it was past. But Burke would hardly
have admitted Arnold’s doctrine that the spirit of chivalry was the
spirit of the devil. If so, it must be the spirit of the grotesque
medi&Dval devil, not of the sublime devil of Gaxlmon and Milton. ' To
one who knows what so-called chivalry really was, it seems not only
evil but contemptible. It was a grotesque caricature of certain virtues
taken out of their due relation to other virtues. The only thing that
can be said for it is that even its false standard was bettor than the
utter absence of any standard at all. And it may be that there have
been times and places when this was the only other alternative. He
who introduces a regulated system of duelling among a people who are
given to indiscriminate throat-cutting does certainly, if the dueUing

760

THE LAW OF HONOUR.

really displaces the throat-cutting, work a great immediate reform.
The question indeed remains whether such a partial reform is more
likely to lead the way to a more thorough reform or to hinder it; but
the improvement at tho time is undoubted. And there is the further
fact that the experience of chivalrous times shows that duelling and
throat-cutting may very well go on side by side. In our own day,
while we no longer hear of duels among gentlemen, wc do sometimes
hear of fights among men of other classes. And, if there must be
fights, it is doubtless better that those fights should be carried on
according to certain rules, that the fight should be what is called
fair. But when we are told, as we sometimes have been told
even from the judicial bench, that there is no great harm in a fight
provided it be fair, the false standard of honour comes in instead
of the standard of law and morals.^ The utmost that honour at its
best can do is to regulate what law and morality altogether forbid,
to keep what is essentially evil from sinking to the very lowest
level of evil. Morals, law, religion, aim, or at least profess, not
merely to look after evil and to keep it from being the lowest evil,
but to take good and try to raise it to the highest good.

Still we may say thus much for the rule of honour and chivalry that
any check, any standard, is better than no check and no standard. It
was better that William Rufus should keep his word sometimes than
that he should never keep it at all. And his fantastic standard of the

probus miles constrained him to keep it sometimes. And, if wc
compare Rufus with Henry the Second, in whose strange mixture of
good and evil, of greatness and pettiness, there is not a spark of
chivalry, wc can see one or two particular crimes of Henry from
which Rufus’ chivalrous feelings might have kept him back. Chi-
vaby is not the worst thing that can be ; and, as such, it may, in
very bad times, have kept things from being still worse. But that
is all that can be said for it. Its standard is imperfect, and, even
when it prescribes the right action, it does not prescribe it from the
right motive. Tho law of honour, the standard of the gentleman,
may do for those who cannot rise to the higher law of right, the
higher standard of the honest man. For such it is doubtless better
than nothing. So the check which an old French Parliament or a
Turkish Sheikl-ul-Islam exercised on the will of a despot was doubtless
better than no check at all. But the law of honour stands as far

(1) Neiilier law nor morality has anything to do with the fairness** of a fight.
Neither of them waits to see whether a fight is fair or not. It is enough for either of
them that thwe is a fight. For an act of violence done in a moment of provocation great
excuse may be fouxid. For a fight, that is, for an act of violence deliberately planned,
there can be no excuse whatever. It is a breach of law and morals done wittingly and
with malice aforethought. Unless the fight can be shown to have been done, on ono
side at least, in the only shape which can justify fighting, namely in strict self-defence,
tkafight, whether fair or unfair, is a crime in all who join in it, though, if it be an
imfaxr fight^ it may .possibly be a greater crime.

THE LAW OE HONOTJE.

761

below 'the law of right as such a Parliament, such a Sheikl-ul-
Islam, stands below a real representative assembly. Lord Macaulay’s
Earl of Peterborough had ^'an abundance of those fine qualities
which may be called luxuries, and a lamentable deficiency of those
solid qualities which are of the first necessity.” “ He had brilliant
wit and ready invention without common sense, and chivalrous
generosity and delicacy without common honesty.”^ Given the
solid qualities, the fine qualities arc an admirable addition, and the
highest standard of morals | will lead to the cultivation of the fine
qualities as well as the solid ones. Chivalry, even in its ideal, culti-
vated the fine qualities at the expense of the solid ones. Duke
Bobert of Normandy refused to attack Winchester because the
Queen was lying in child -bed within its walls.' But for her presence,
the city might have been assaulted, stormed, sacked, burned, without
remorse. That was chivalry ; it was regard to a single person of
exalted rank. The law of right bids a man count the danger and
suffering which must fall, not on one person, but on hundreds and
thousands, before he draws the sword at all. But, if his conscience
tells him that the cause in which he draws it is one so righteous
that it justifies exposing hundreds and thousands to such a risk, ho
should not, merely for the sake of one, draw back from any opera-
tion by which the righteous cause can be promoted. Still we here
see the better, perhaps because the earlier, side of chivalry. There
is generosity, though a fantastic generosity. But what chivalry
really was we learn from its boasted model, the Knight without Fear
and without Bcproach. It shows the morals of chivalry that the
Knight without Iteproach has won himself the fame of superhuman
virtue, simply by abstaining from an act of extreme and superhuman
scoundrelism. It shows how little chivalry was able to realize even
the higher military ideal, when the Knight without Fear could,
rather than give up an inch of aristocratic exclusiveness, sink to the
part of a coward. Knights and gentlemen might enjoy the sport
of battle, as they might enjoy the sport of the chase or the tourney.
But when hard, burthensome, dangerous work was to be done, that
might be all very well for plebeian lanzknechU ; the gentlemen of
France could not risk their blood in such dangers or march by the
side of such ignoble comrades. The men who died in obedience to
the laws of Sparta may have been as'hard masters to their helots as
ever French gentleman could be to his villains. But they at least
did not send their helots on enterprises from which they shrank them-
selves. The law of Sparta was doubtless in many points as defective
as any code of honour. Still it was for the reality of law, not for the
shadow of honour, that her children gave their lives.

Edward A. Frbbman.

(1) " History of England,” iv. 764.

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

I.>— The Sfibitual Fobm of Fibe and Dew.

'Wbetebsoii mythology speak habitually of the religion of the Greeks.
In thus speaking, they are really' using a misleading expression, and
should speak rather of religiom; each race and class of Greeks — the
Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers — Shaving had a religion of
its own, conceived independently of the objects that came nearest to
it and were most in its thoughts, and the resulting usages and ideas
never having come to have a precisely harmonised system, after the
analogy of some other religions. The religion of Dionysus is the
religion of people who pass their lives among the vines. As the
religion of Demeter carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads
of Ghreece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive race, in the
furrow and beside the granary ; so the religion of Dionysus carries
us back to its vineyards, and is a monument of the ways and thoughts
of people whoso days go by beside the winepress, and under the
green and purple ^adows, and whose material happiness depends on
the crop of grapes. For them tho thought of Dionysus and his
circle, a little Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of
life, and was a complete religion, a sacred representation or inter-
pretation of the general human experience, modified by the special
imitations, the special privileges of insight or suggestion, incident
to their peculiar mode of existence.

Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the scope of the
religion of Dionysus was to the Gh^eks who lived in it, all it
represented to them by way of one clearly conceived yet complex
symbol, let him reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and
expression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out
of the whole body of existing poetry ; how many fascinating trains
of reflection, what colour and substance would therewith have been
deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more awful associations
of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad’s cup, with all the
various symbdUsm of the fruit of the vine. That supposed loss is
but an imperfect measure of all that the name of Dionysus recalled
to the- Greek mind, under a single imaginable form, an outward body
of flesh oompaoted together, closing in, as its animating soul, a whole
world of thoughts, surmises, greater and less experiences.

The student of the comparative science of rdigimis finds in the
religion of Dionysus one of those many modes of primitive tree-
3#onhip. which, growing out of some universal instinctive bdief that
trees and flowers are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found

A. STUDY OP Dtoinrsus.

768

almost* everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, enshrined in
legend or custom, often graceful enough, as if the ddicate beauty of
the object of worship had effectually taken ,hold on the fancy of
the worshipper. Shelley’s Sensitive Plant shows in what mists of
poetical reverie such feeling may still float about a mind full of
modem culture, the feeling we too have of a life in the green world,
always ready to assert its claim over our sympathetic fancies. Who
has not at moments felt the scruple, which is with us always regard-
ing animal life, following the signs of animation further still, till
one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of flower or leaf ?

And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share ; what was
crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic,
imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of
Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate
the suspicion that the soimds of the wind in the trees may be, for
certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible voices ; they could
believe in the transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel,
mint and hyacinth ; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid are but
, a fossilised form of one morsel hero and there, from a whole world of
transformation, with which their nimble fancy was perpetually play-
ing. Together with them,” says the llomeric hymn to Aphrodite,
of the Hamadryads, the njonphs which animate the forest trees,

with them, at the moment of their birth, grew up out of the soil,
oak-tree or pine, fair, flourishing among the mountains. And when
at last the appointed hour of their death has come, first of all, those
fair trees are dried up ; the bark perishes from around them, and
the branches fall away ; and therewith the soul of them deserts the
light of the sun.”

These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it with interchange
of sun and shade. They bathe, dance, sing songs of enchantment,
so that those who seem oddly in love with nature, and strange among
their fellows, arc still said to be nympholepti ; above all, they are
weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and
subtlest, many-coloured threads, the foliage of tho trees, the petals
of flowers, tho skins of the Fruit, the long thin stalks on which the
poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer compares to them, in
their constant motion, the maids who sit spinning in the house of
Alcinous. The nymphs of Hoxos, where the grape-skin is darkest,
weave for him a purple robe. Only, the ivy is never transformed,
is visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing the dark outline of its
leaves dose upon the firm, white, quite human flesh of the god’s
forehead.

In its earliest form, then, the religion of Dionysus presents us
with the most graceflil phase of this graceful worship, occupying a
place between the ruder fancies of half-civilised people concerning

764

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

life in flower or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of
the Sensitke Plant He is the soul of the individual vine, first ; the
' young vine at the house-door of the newly married, for instance, as
the vine-grower stoops over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet
animal or a little child ; afterwards, the soul of the whole species,
the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines, as
the higher intelligence, brooding more deeply over things, pursues,
in thought, the generation of sweetness and strength in the veins of
the tree, the transformation of water into wine, little gush by gush ;
noting all the influences on it of the heaven above and the earth
beneath ; and shadowing forth, in each pause of the process, an
intervening person — ^what is to us but the secret chemistry of nature
being to them the mediation of living spirits. So they passed on to
think of Dionysus (naming him at last from the brightness of the
sky and the moisture of the earth) not merely as the soul of the
vine, but of all that life in flowing things of which the vine is the
symbol, because its most emphatic example. At Delos he bears a
son, from whom in turn spring the three mysterious sisters (Eno,
Spermo, and Elais, who, dwelling in the island, exercise respectively
the gifts of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and wine.
In. the BoccIkp of Euripides, he gives his followers, by miracle, honey
and milk, and the water gashes for them from the smitten rock. He
comes at last to have a scope equal to that of Demoter, a realm as
wide and mysterious as hers ; the whole productive power of the
earth is in him, and the explanation of its annual change. As some
embody their intuitions of that power in corn, so others in wine. He
is the dispenser of the earth’s hidden wealth, giver of riches through
the vine, as Demeter through the grain. And as Demeter sends the
airy, dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptolcmus to bear
her gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus goes on his eastern
journey, with its many intricate adventures, in which he carries his
gifts to every people.

A little OlympuB outside the greater, I said, of Dionysus and his
companions ; he is the centre of a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures
of water and sunlight in many degrees ; and that fantastic system of
tree- worship places round him, not the fondly whispering spirits of
the more graceful inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs of the
pojdar and the pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening between
the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the grosser, less human
spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more coarse and sluggish
sorts of vegetable strength, the fig, the reed, the ineradicable weed-
things which will attach themselves, climbing about the vine-poles,
or aeieking the sun between the hot stones. For as Dionysus, the
•^ritual form of the vine, is of the highest human type, so the fig-tree
and the reed have animal spuls, mistakable in the thoughts of a
later, imperfectly remembering age, for mere embodiments of animal

A STUDY OP DIONYSUS. 766

natiufe ; jSnubnose, and Sweetwinei and Silenusi the oldest of them
all, BO old that he has come to have the gift of prophecy.

Quite different from them in origin and intent, but confused with
them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his
children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in
the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story ; he
is but a presence ; the spiritml form of Arcadia, and the ways of
human life there ; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks,
and orchards, and wild honey ; the dangers of its hunters ; its weari-
ness in noonday heatf its children, nimble as the goats they tend,
who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer’s
j>ath, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places ; its one adorn-
ment and solace, the dance to the homely shepherd’s pipe, cut by
Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.

Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which is so profound in
the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, the foldings of the hills, the
leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the
heights, “ the bird, which among the petals of many-fiowered
spring, pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song,”
** the crocus and the hyacinth disorderly mixed in the deep grass” —
things which the religion of Dionysus loves — ^he joins the company
of the Satyrs. Amongst them, they give their names to insolence
and mockery, and the finer sorts of malice, to unmeaning and
ridiculous fear. But the best spirits have found in them also a
certain human pathos, as in displaced beings, coming even nearer to
most men, in their very roughness, than the noble and delicate person
of the vine ; dubious creatures, half-way between the animal and
human kinds, speculating wistfully on their being, because not
wholly understanding themselves and their place in nature ; as the
animals seem always to have this expression to some noticeable
degree in the presence of man. In the later school of Attic sculp-
ture they are treated with more and more of refinement, till in some
happiest moments Praxiteles conceived a model, often repeated,
which concentrates this sentiment of true humour concerning them ;
a model of dainty natural case in posture, but with the legs slightly
crossed, as only lowly bred gods are used to carry them, and with
some puzzled trouble of youth, you might wish for a moment to
smooth away, puckering the forehead a little, between the pointed
ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal strength grows low.
Litde by little, the signs of brute nature are subordinated, or dis-
appear ; and at last, Kobetta, a humble Italian engraver of the
fifteenth century, entering into the Greek fancy because it belongs to
all ages, has expressed it in its most exquisite form, in a design of
Geres and her children, of whom their mother is no longer afiraid,
as in the Homeric hymn. The puck-noses have grown delicate, so

VOL. XX. N.S. 3 £

766

A BIUDT OF DIONYSUS.

that^ with Plato’s in&tuated lover, you may call them, wiuscftne, if
you please ; and no one would wish those hairy little shanks away,
with which one of the small Pans walks at her side, grasping her
skirt stoutly ; while the other, the sick or weary one, rides in the
arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful Italian dress, and decked
airily with fruit and com, steps across a country of cut sheaves,
pressing it closely to her, with a child’s peevish trouble in its face,
and its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs folded over together, precisely
after the manner of a little child.

There is one element in the conception of Dionysus which his con-
nexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being one of them, and with Pan,
from whom the flute passed to aU the shepherds of Theocritus, alike
illustrates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species of music.
One form of that wilder vegetation, of which the Satyr race is the
soul made visible, is the reed, which the creature plucks and trims
into musical pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over all the
music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over all the music
of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and of
vegetable life are brought close together, natural property, therefore,
of the spirit of life in the green sap. I said that the religion of
Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete religion, a com-
plete sacred representation and interpretation of the whole of life ;
and as, in his relation to the vine, he fills for them the place of
Demeter, is the life of the earth through the grape as she through
the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in his relation to the
reed, he fills for them the place of Apollo ; he is the inherent cause
of music and poetry ; he inspires ; he explains the phenomena of
enthusiasm, as distinguished by Plato in the Phwdrm^ the secrets of
possession by a higher and more energetic spirit than one’s own, the
gift of self-revelation, of passing out of oneself through words,
tones, gestures. A winged Dionysus, venerated at Amycla), was
perhaps meant to represent him thus, as the god of-^enthusiasm, of
the rising up on those spiritual wings, of which also we hear some-
thing in the PhoedniH of Plato.

The artists of the Benaissance occupied themselves much with the
person and the story of Dionysus ; and Michelangelo, in a work
still remaining in Florence, and in which he essayed with success to
produce a thing which should pass with the critics for a piece of
ancient sculpture, has represented him in the fulness, as it seems, of
this enthusiasm, an image of delighted, entire surrender to trans-
porting drcams. And this is no subtle after-thought of a later age,
hat true to certain finer movements of old Ghreek sentiment, though
it may seem to have waited for the hand of Michelangelo before it
attained complete realisation. The head of Ion leans, as thqr recline^
at the banquet, on the shoulder of Ohaimides ; he mutters in his

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

767

deep of 'tkings seen therein, but awakes as the flute-players enter,
whom Charmides has hired for his birthday supper, soul of

Oallias, who Sits on the other side of Charmides, flashes out ; he
counterfeits, with life-like gesture, the personal tricks of friend or
foe ; or the things he could never utter before, he finds words for
now ; the secrets of life are on his lips. It is in this loosening of
the lips and heart, strictly, that Dionysus is the Deliverer; and of
such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain sense, an older patron
than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi, the centre of Greek inspira-
tion and of the religion of Apollo, his claim always maintained
itself ; and signs are not wanting that Apollo was but a later comer
there. The pediment of the great temple was divided between
them— Apollo with the nine Muses on that side, Dionysus, with
perhaps three times three Graces, on this. A third of the whole
year was hold sacred to him ; the four winter months were the
months of Dionysus ; and in the shrine of Apollo itself he was wor-
shipped with almost equal devotion.

The religion of Dionysus takes us back into that old Gh*eek life of
the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much there
as we should find it now, as wc see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli’s medimval
fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Oampo Santo at Pisa —
the family of Noah, presented among all the circumstances of a
Tuscan vineyard, around tho press from which the first wine is
flowing, a painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in
decay, and not without its solemn touch of biblical symbolism. For
diflerences, we detect in that primitive life, and under that Greek
sky, a nimbler play of fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all
things with personal aspect and incident, and a certain mysticab
apprehension of unseen powers, beyond the material veil of things,,
now almost departed, corresponding to the exceptional vigour and
variety of the Greek organisation. This peasant life lies, in unhistoric
time, behind the definite forms with which poetry and a refined
priesthood afterwards clothed the religion of Dionysus; and the
mere scenery and circumstances of the vineyard have determined
many things in its development. The noise of the vineyard still
sounds in some of his epithets, perhaps in his best-known name— ^
lacchm^ Bacchus. The masks suspended on base or comice> so
familiar an ornament in later Greek architecture, are the,little faces
hanging from the vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds.
That garland of ivy, the msthetic value of which is so great in the
later imagery of Dionysus and his descendants, the leaves of which,
floating from his hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and
Tintoret, was actually worn on the head for coolness ; his earliest and
most sacred images were wrought in the wood of the vine. The
people of the vineyard had their feast, the little or country Dionysian
which still lived on, side by side with the greater ceremonies of a

3e 2

758

A ErrUDT OP DIONYSUS.

later time^ celebrated in December^ the time of the storing of tbe
new wine. It was then that the potters’ fair came, calpiB and
amphora^ together with lamps against the winter, laid out in order
for the choice of buyers ; for Keramus, the Greek Vase, is a son of
Dionysus, of wine and of Athene, who teaches men all serviceable and
decorative art. Then the goat was killed, and its blood poured out
at the root of the vines ; and Dionysus literally drank the blood of
goats ; and, being Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies, ‘‘super-
stitious,” or rather “susceptible of religious impressions,” some among
them, remembering those departed since last year, add yet a little
more, and a little wine and water, for the dead also ; brooding how
the sense of these things might pass below the roots, to spirits hungry
and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes. But the gaiety, that
gaiety which Aristophanes in the Acharnians has depicted with so
many vivid touches, as a thing of which civil war had deprived the
villages of Attica, preponderates over the grave. The travelling
country show comes round with its puppets ; even the slaves have
their holiday ; ^ the mirth becomes excessive ; they hide their faces
under grotesque masks of bark, or stain them with winc-lecs, or
potters’ crimson even, like the old rude idols painted red ; and carry
in midnight procession such rough symbols of the productive force of
nature as the women and children had best not look upon ; which
will be frowTied upon, and refine themselves, or disappear, in the
feasts of cultivated Athens.

Of the whole story of Dionysus, it was the episode of his marriage
with Ariadne about which ancient art concerned itself oftenest, and
with most effect. Here, although the antiquarian may still detect
circumstances which link the persons and incidents of the legend
with the mystical life of the earth, as symbols of its annual change,
yet the merely human interest of the story has prevailed over its
earlier significance ; the spiritual form of fire and dew has become a
romantic lover. And as a story of romantic love, fullest perhaps of
all the motives of classic legend of the pride of life, it survived with
undiminished interest to a later world, two of the greatest masters
of Italian painting having poured their whole power into it ; Titian
with greater space of ingathered shore and mountain, and solemn
foliage, and fiery animal life ; Tintoret with profounder luxury of
delight in the nearness to each other, and imminent embrace, of
glorious bodily presences; though both alike with consummate
beauty of physical form. Hardly less humanised is the Theban
legend of Dionysus, the legend of his birth from Semele, which, out
of the entire body of tradition concerning him, was accepted as
/central by the Athenian imagination. For the people of Attica, he

(1) There are some who euspect Dionysus of a seoiet demooratio interest; though
indeed he is Hberatcr only of men's hearts, and iXcvScpeivc only because he never
togqt Eleothersd, the UtUe place iduob, in A^ca, first received him.

A STUDY OY DIONYSUS,

769

eomes from BoDotia, a country of northern marsh and mist, but from
whose sombre, black marble towns came also the Tine, the musica^
reed cut from its sedges, and the ^worship of the Graces, always so
closely connected with the religion of Dionysus. At Thebes alone,”
says Sophocles, ** mortal women bear immortal gods.” His mother
is the daughter of Cadmus, himself marked out by many curious
circumstances as the close kinsman of the earth, to which ho all but
returns at last, as the serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer
sense lingering there of the affinity of man with the dust from whence
he came. Semele, an old Greek word, as it seems, for the surface of
the earth, the daughter of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus, desires to see
her lover in the glory with which he is seen by the immortal Hera.
He appears to her in lightning. But the mortal may not behold
him and live. Semele gives premature birth to the child Dionysus ;
whom, to preserve it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in a part
of his thigh, the child returning into the loins of its father, whence
in due time it is bom again. Yet in this fantastic story, hardly less
than in the legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has become a
story of human persons, with human fortunes, and even more intimately
human appeal to sympathy ; so that Euripides, pre-eminent as a poet
of pathos, finds in it a subject altogether to his mind. AH the interest
now turns on the development of its points of moral or sentimental
Bignificanco ; the love of the immortal for the mortal, the presump-
tion of the daughter of man who desires to see the divine form as it
is, on the fact that not without loss of sight, or life itself, can man
look upon it. The travail of nature has been transformed into the
pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the
pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making Dionysus, as Calli*
machuB calls him, a seven months’ child, cast out among its enemies
motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest, the
legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite sacred
objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which fell
into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-fiash, and which the
piety of a later age covered with plates of brass ; the Imj-Fountain
near Thebes, the water of which was so wonderfully bright and sweet
to drink, where the nymphs bathed the new-born child ; the grave
of Semele, in a sacred inclosure grown with ancient vines, where
some volcanic heat or fiame was perhaps actually traceable, near the
lightning-struck ruins of her supposed abode.

Yet though the mystical body of the earth is forgotten in the
human anguish of the mother of Dionysus, the sense of his essence
of fire and dew still lingers in his most sacred name, as the son of
Semele, IMhyramhm. We speak of a certain wild music in words or
rhythm as dithyramhicy like the dithyrambus, that is, the wild chpral-
singing of the worshippers of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems
to have been in the first instance the name, not of the hymn, but of

760

A STUDY OF DIOKYSUS.

e

ih3 god to whom the hymn is song ; and, through a tangle of curious
etymological speculations as to the precise derivation of this name,
one thing seems clearly visible, that it commemorates, namely, the
double birth of the vine-god ; that he is bom once and again ; his
birth, first of fire, and afterwards of dew ; the two dangers that beset
him; his victory over two enemies, the capricious and excessive
heats and colds of spring.

He is *jrvpiyevri ^9 then, fire-bom, the son of lightning ; lightning
being to light, as regards concentration, what wine is to the other
strengths of the earth. And who that has rested a hand on the
glittering silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes
of sweetness lie, does not feel this P It is out of the bitter salts of
a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most curious virtues.
The mother faints, and is parched up by the heat, which brings the
child to the birth ; and it pierces through, a wonder of freshness,
drawing its everlasting green and typical coolness out of the midst
of the ashes ; its own stem becoming at last like a tangled mass of
tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-bom, the
Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of all
tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom
before the leaf, like the Uitlo mezereon-plant of English gardens,
with its pale purple, wine-scented flowers upon the leafless twigs in
Febmary, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that
budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when Tannhauser is
saved.

And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of which he was
bom would destroy him in his turn, as it withered up his mother ;
a second danger comes; from this the plant is protected by the
influence of the cooling doud, the lower part of his father the sky,
in which it is wrapped and hidden, aud of which it is born again,
its second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Ilyd, the
Dew. The nursery where Zeus places it to be brought up is a cave
in Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands,
but really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place
of fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside,
nowhere and everywhere where the vine was “invented.” The
nymphs of the trees overshadow it from above ; the nymphs of the
springs sustain it from below ; the Hyades^ those first leaping mecnads,
who,^ as the springs become rain-clouds, go up to heaven among the
stars, and descend again as dew or shower upon it; so that the
religion of Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, but
also with ancient water-worship, the worship of the ^iritml forms of
springs and* streams. To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps
into the sea, the original of all rain and springs, whence, in early
4^1^, the women of Elis and Argos were wont to call him, with the
eubtging of a hymn. And again, in thus commemorating Di<mysus

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

761

as bom of ihedew^ the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment,
the poetry, of water. For not the heat only but the solace of it, the
freshness of the cup— this too was felt by those people of the vine-
yard, whom the prophet Melampus had teught to mix always their
wine with water, and with whom the watering of the vines became a
religious ceremony ; the very doj^d, as they thought, drinking of,
and refreshed by, the stream. And who that has ever felt the heat
of a southern country does not know this poetry, the motive of
the loveliest of all the works attributed to GUorgione, the Fite
Champitre in the Louvre ; the intense sensations, the subtle,, far-
reaching symbolisms, which in these places, cling about the touch,
and sound, and sight of it P Think of the darkness of the well in
the breathless court, with the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just
within the opening of it ; of the sound of the fresh water flowing
through the wooden pipes into the houses of Yenice on summer
mornings ; of the cry Acqua fresca ! at Padua, or Yerona, when the
people run to buy what they prize, in its rare purity, more than
wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite appeal to the imagination,
that, in these streets, the very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust
all the philosophy of the epicurean.

Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers’ god, the spiritual
form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous representations of Dionysus
in later art and poetry, the Baechce of Euripides, the statuary of the
school of Praxiteles, a multitude of literary allusions, epithets, local
eustoms, carry us back to this world of vision, unchecked by positive
knowledge, in which the myth is begotten, among a primitive
people, as they wondered over the Ufe of the thing their hands
helped forward, till it became a kind of spirit, and their culture of
it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry,
is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this primitive
people, brooded over, and harmonised, by the energetic Greek imagi-
nation ; the religious imagination of the Greeks being precisely a
unifying, or identifying power, bringing together things naturally
asunder, making, for instance, for human body, a soul of waters,
for human soul, flesh of flowers ; welding into something like the
identity of a human personality the whole range of man’s experiences
of a given object, or series of objects; all their outward qualities, and
the visible facts regarding them, all the hidden ordinances by which
those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots
in purely visionary places.

Dionysus came later than the other gods to the centres of Greek
life; and, as a consequence of this, he is presented to us in an
earlier stage of development than they; that element ^ of natural
fact which is the original essence of all mythology being more
unmistakably impressed upon us here than in other myths. Not the
least interesting point in the study of him is, that he illustrates very

762

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

dearly, not only the earlier, but also a certain later influence of this
element of natural fact, in the development of the gods of Gbeeoe.
For the physical sense, latent in it, is the clue, not merely to the
original signification of the incidents of the divine story, but also to
the source of the peculiar imaginative expression which its persons
subsequently retain, in the forms of the higher Greek sculpture.
And this leads me to some general thoughts on the relation of Greek
sculpture to mythology, which may help to explain what the function
of the imagination in Greek sculpture really was, in its handling of
divine persons.

That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive intention, the open sky,
across which the thunder sometimes sounds, and from which the rain
descends, not only explains the various stories related concerning
him, but determines also the expression which he retained in the
work of Pheidias, so far as it is possible to recall it, long after the
growth of those stories had obscured in the minds of his worshippers
his primary signification. If men felt, as Arrian tells us, that it was
a calamity to die without having seen the Zeus of Olympia ; that was
because they experienced the impress there of that which the eye
and the whole being of man love to find above him ; and the
genius of Pheidias had availed to shed, upon the gold and ivory of
the physical form, the blandness, the breadth, the smile of that ; the
mild heat of it still coming and going, in the face of the father of all
the children of sunshine and shower ; as if one of the great white
clouds had composed itself into it, and looked down upon them so,
out of the midsummer noonday ; so that those things might be felt
as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak
and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god’s presence, as
procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts
of the Olympian temple ; while all the time those people consciously
divined in Zeus none but the personal, and really human, character-
istics.

0]> think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The oracle of Dodona,
with its dim grove of oaks, and sounding instruments of brass to
husband the faintest whisper in the leaves, was but a great conse-
cration of that sense of a mysterious will, of which people still feel, or
seem to feel, the expression, in the motions of the wind, as it cornea
and goes, and which makes it indeed seem almost more than a mere
symbol of the spirit within us. For Zeus was indeed the god of the
winds also; iEolus, their so-called god, being only his mortal
minister, as having come, by long study of them, through signs in
the fire and the like, to have a certain communicable skill regarding
them, in relation to practical uses. • Now, suppose a Greek sculptor
to have proposed to himself to present to his worshippers the image
of this Dodonasan Zeus, who is in the trees and on the currents of
the air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative sculptor, working

▲ STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

76 »

as Pheidias worked, the yery soul of those moying, sonorous creatures
would haye passed through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the
image ; as they con actually pass into the yisible expression of those
who haye drunk deeply of them, as we may notice sometimes in
our walks on mountain or shore.

Victory again, Niki^ associated so often with Zeus, on the top of
his staff, on the foot of his. throne, on the palm of his extended hand,
meant originally, science tells us, only the great yictory of the sky,
the triumph of morning oyer darkness. But that physical morning
has its ministiy to the aesthetic sense also, though unaware. For if
Nik^t when she appears in company with the mortal, and wholly fleshly,
hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide the horses, or whom she crowns
with her garland of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on a
shield, is imaginatiyely conceived, it is because the old skyey
influences are still not quite suppressed in her clear-set eyes, and the
dew of the morning still clings ta her wings and her floating hair.

The office of the imagination then, in Ghreek sculpture, in its
handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of
natural things into human form ; to retain that early mystical sense
of water, or wind, or light, in the moulding of eye and brow ; to
arrest it, and imprison, or rather set it free, there, as hiunan expres-
sion. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still genuine
work of Prometheus, and its connection with earth and air asserted
in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable
stages of descent, but direct and immediate ; in direct contrast to
our physical theory of our life, never fading, dream over it as we
will, out of the light of common day. The oracles with their
messages to human intelligence from bird, or spring, or vapours of
the earth, were a witness to it. Their story went back, as they
believed, with unbroken continuity, and in the very places where
their later life was lived, to a past, stretching beyond, yet continuous
with, actual memory, in which heaven and earth mingled; to those
who were sons and daughters of stars, and streams, and dew; to an
ancestry of grander men and women, actually clothed in, or
incorporate with, the qualities and influences of those imposing
objects ; and we can hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek
imagination of this mythical connection with them, at not so remote
a date, and of the solenmising power exercised by them over their
thoughts. In this intensely poetical situation, the historical Greeks,
the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found themselves ; it was as if
the actual roads on which men daily walk, went up and on, into a
visible wonderland.

With such habitual impressions concerning the body, the physical
nature of man, the Greek sculptor, in his later day, still free in
imagination through the lingering influence of those early dreams,
may have more easily infused into human form the sense of sun, or

764

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

ligbtning, or oloud, to whicli it was so closely akin, the ‘spiritual
flesh allying itself happily to mystical meanings, and readily express-
ing seemingly unspeakable qualities. But the human form is a
limiting influence also ; and in proportion as art impressed human
form, in sculpture or in the drama, on the vaguer conceptions of the
Greek mind, there was danger of an escape from them of the free
spirit of air, and light, and sky. Hence, all through the history of
Gre^ art, there is a struggle, a romantic Streheny as the Germans say,
between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating
essence it is to contain, as really as the vase its perfumes, only more
subtly. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid, world, of old
beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of
Hesiod ; a world, the Titanic bigness of which is congruous with a
certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of
motion or space ; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copious-
ness and energy of words for wind, fire, water, cold, sound, attesting
a deep susceptibility to the impressions of those things, yet with
edges most often melting into each other. On the other hand, was that
limiting, controlling tendency, identified with the Dorian influence
in the history of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and wholly
self-conscious intelligence ; bent on impressing everywhere, in the
products of the imagination, the definite, entirely conceivable human
form, as the only worthy subject of art ; less in sympathy with the
mystical genealogies of Hesiod, than with the heroes of Homer,
ending in the perfectly humanised religion of Apollo, the clearly
understood humanity of the mr~men in the ^ginetan marbles.
The representation of man as he is, or might be, became the aim
of sculpture, and the achievement of this the subject of its whole
history ; one had opened the eyes, another the lips, a third had
given motion to the feet ; in various ways, in spite of the retention
of archaic idols, the genuine human expression had come, with the
truthfulness of life itself. ^

These two tendencies, then, met and struggled, and were
harmonised in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias in sculpture,
of .^schylus in the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous personalities,
of which the Greek imagination became the dwelling-place ; beauti-
ful, perfectly understood human outlines, encompassing a strange,
delightful, lingering sense of clouds and water and sun. Such a
world, the world of really imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see,
reflieoted in many a humble vase or battered coin, in Bacchant^ and
Oeuiaur, and Amazon ; evolved out of that '^vasty deep ; ” with most
command, in the consummate fragments of the Parthenon; not,
indeed, so ^t he who runs may read, the gifts of Greek sculpture
beihg always delicate, and asking much of the receiver ; but still,
visible, and a pledge, to u^ of creative power, as to the worshipper, of

r

A sivsT 07 Dioimnrs.

765

the presenoe, whioli, without it^ had more Taguely haunted the fidde
and groyes.

This^ then, was what the Greek imagination did, for men’s sense
and experience of natural forces; in Athen^, in Zeus, in Poseidon ;
for men’s sense and experience of their own bodily qualities — swift-
ness, energy, power of concentrating sight, and hand, and foot, on a
momentary physical act — ^in the close hair, the chastened muscle, the
perfectly poised attention of the discobolus ; for men’s sense, again, of
ethical qualities — ^restless idealism, inward vision, power of presence
through that vision in scenes behind the experience of ordinary
men — ^in the idealised Alexander.

To illustrate this function of tho imagination, as eq)ecially
developed in Greek art, we may reflect on what happens with us in
the use of certain names, as expressing summarily, this name and
that for me — ^Helen, Ghretchen, Mary — a himdred associations,
trains of sound, forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of degrees,
which, through a very wide and full experience, they have the power
of bringing with them ; in which respect, such names are but reveal-
ing instances of the whole significance, power, and use of language in
general. Well, the mythical conception, projected at last, in drama
or sculpture, is the name, the instrument of the identification, of the
given matter ; its unity in variety, its outline or definition in mystery ;
its spiritual fonn^ to use again the expression I have borrowed from
William Blake — ^form, with hands, and lips, and opened eyelids —
spiritual, as conveying to us therein, a soul of rain, or of a Greek
river, or of swiftness, or purity.

Again, think what the efiect would be, if you could associate, hy
some trick of memory, a certain group of natural objects, in all their
varied perspective, their changes of colour and tone in varying light
and shade, with the being and image of an actual person. You
travelled through a country of clear rivers and wide meadows, or of
high windy places, or of lowly grass and willows, or of the Lady of
the Lake; and all the complex impressions of these objects wound them-
selves, as a second animated body, new and more subtle, around the
person of man or woman left there, so that they no longer come to
recollection apart from each other.* Now try to conceive the image
of an actual person, in whom, somehow, all those impressions of the
vine and its fruit, as the highest type of the life of the green sap, had
become incorporate ; all the scents and colours of flower and fruit,
and something of its curling foliage ; the chances of its growth ; the
enthusiasm, the easy flow of choicer expression, as its juices mount
within one ; for the thing is eloquent, too, in word, gesture, and
glancing of the eyes, as seeming to flow from some soul of vme within
it. As Wordsworth says,

« Beauty bom of munauiixig sound
Shall pass into her fooe ; ”

766

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

80 conceive an image into whicli tlie beauty ^^bom” of the vine Has
passed ; and you have tbe idea of Dionysus^ as be appears, entirely
iasbioned at last, by central Greek poetiy and art, and is consecrated
in tbe great festivals of tbe Winepresses and tbe Fbwers.

Tbe word wine, and with it tbe germ of tbe mytb of Dionysus, is
older than tbe separation of tbe Indo-Germanic people. Yet, with
tbe people of Athens, Dionysus counted as tbe youngest of tbe gods ;
be was also tbe son of a mortal, dead in cbildbirtb, and seems always
to bave exercised tbe cbarm of tbe latest bom, in a sort of allowable
fondness. Through tbe fine-spun speculations of modem ethnologists
and grammarians, noting the changes in tbe letters of bis name, and
catching at the slightest historical records of bis worship, we may
trace bis coming from Phrygia, tbe birthplace of tbe more mystical
elements of Greek religion, over tbe mountains of Thrace. On tbe
heights of Fangseus be leaves an oracle, with a perpetually burning
fire, famous to tbe time of Augustus, who reverently visited it.
Southwards still, over tbe bills of Parnassus, which remained for
tbe inspired women of Bcootia tbe centre of bis presence, be comes
to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From BoDOtia be passes to
Attica ; to the villages first, at last to Athens ; at an assignable
date, under Peisistratus ; out of the country, into tbe town.

To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of enthusiasm already
belonged ; it was to the Athenian of tbe town, to urbane young
men, sitting together in the banquet, that those expressions of a
sudden eloquence came, of tbe loosened utterance and finer speech,
its colour and imagery. Dionysus, then, has entered Athens, to
become urbane like them ; to walk along the marble streets in fre-
quent procession, in tbe persons of noble youths, like those who at
tbe Oschophoria bore the branches of vino from bis temple to tbe
temple of Atheni of the Parasol, or of beautiful slaves ; to contribute
through the arts to tbe adornment of life, yet perbapf also in part to
weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradually bis rough country
feasts will be outdone by the feasts of tbe town ; and as comedy
arose out of those, so these will give to tragedy. For bis entrance
upon this new stage of his career, bis coming into tbe town, is from
the fiirst tinged with melancholy, as if in entering tbe town be bad
put ofi bis country peace. Tbe other Olympians are above sorrow.
Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Fer^ieus,
has bis alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and b^rd-won
triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then, of Dionysus in
winter, that all Greek tragedy grows ; out of tbe song of tbe sorrows
of Dionysus, sung at bis winter feast by tbe chorus of satyrs, singers
dad in goat-skins, in memory of bis rural life, one and another of
whom, from time to time, steps out of tbe company to emphasise and
devdop this or that circumstance of tbe story ; and so the song

A emiDT OF DIONTS0S. 767

•

becomes dramatic. He will soon forget that early country life, or
remember it but as the dreamy background of his later existence.
He will become, as always in later art and poetry, of dazzling white-
ness ; no longer dark with air and sun, but Uke one taKiarpoffniKw^,
brought up under the shade of Eastern porticos or payilions, or in
the light that has only reached him softened through the texture of
green leaves ; honey-pale, like the delicate people of the city, like
the flesh of women, as those old vase-painters conceive of it, who
leave their hands and faces untouched with the pencil on the white
clay. The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or
coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in the white, graceful,
mournful figure, weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in a great
yearning. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town-
feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must suppose,
not the later Athens which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of
Pericles and Fheidias, but that little earlier Athens of Peisistratus,
which the Persians destroyed, which some of us perhaps would
rather have seen, in its early naivete, than the greater one ; when
the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock of
an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherse to
his first temple in the Leneeum, the place of the winepresses, near
the Limnm, the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave
of Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky
ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erectheus and the
grave of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing
there, and the old snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in
the temple court.

The artists of the Benaissance have treated Dionysus many times,
and with great eflect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment of that
glory of nature to which the Benaissance was a return. But in an
early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated
differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren
hill, the bridgo and towers of an Italian town, and quiet water. In
the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture
of statuesque weariness ; the leaves of the vine are grandly drawn,
and wreatUng heavily round tho goodly hair of the god, suggest the
notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great
vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of wine flow along
the earth ; whfle the left supports the forehead, shadowing heavily
a face, comely, but full of an expression of painful brooding. One
knows not how far one may really be from the mind of the old Italian
engraver, in gathering from his design this impression of a melan-
choly and sorrowing Dionysus. But modem motives are clearer ; ,
and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of
the Boyal Academy of 1868 , there was a complete and very flusci-

788

A STUDY OP DIOOTSUS.

nating realiaation of sucli a motiye; the god of the bitterness of
winoi ** of things too sweet ; the sea- water of the Lesbian grape
become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment
of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, ^ is anything similar in senti**
ment to be actually found, we as]^ in the range of Ghreek ideas P —
had some antitype of this fascinating figure any place in Greek
religion P Yes ; in a certain darker side of the double god of nature,
obscured behind the brighter q)isodes of Thebes and liTaxos, but
never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper, more
refined idea, really existed ; the conception of Dionysus Zagreus ; an
image, which has left indeed but little effect in Greek art and poetry,
which criticism has to put patiently together, out of late scattered
hints in various writers ; but which is yet discernible, clearly enough
to show that it really visited some Greek minds here and there ;
and discernible, not as a late after-thought, but as a tradition really
primitive, congruous with the original motive of the idea of Dionysus*
In its potential, though unrealised scope, it is perhaps the subtlest
dream in Gh*eek religious poetry, and is at least part of the complete
physiognomy of Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to modem
culture.

The ultimate scope of the thought of Dionysus, a dual god of both
summer and winter, became, as we saw, almost identical with that
of Demeter. The Phrygians believed that the god slept in winter
and awoke in summer, and celebrated his waking and sleeping ; or
that he was bound and imprisoned in winter, and unbound in spring*
In Elis and at Argos, we saw how the women called him out of the
sea, with the singing of hymns, in early spring ; and a beautiful
ceremony in the temple at Delphi, which, as we know, he shares
with Apollo, described by Plutarch, represents his mystical resur-
rection. Yearly, about the time of the shortest day, just as the
light begins to increase, and while hope is still tremulously strung,
the priestesses of Dionysus assembled with many lights at the
shrine, and there, with songs and dances, awoke the new-born
child after his wintiy sleep, waving in a sacred cradle, like the
great basket used for winnowing com, a symbolical image, or per-
haps a real infant. He is twofold then, a Loppelganger ; like
Persephone, he belongs to two worlds, and has much in common
with her, and a full share of those dark possibilities which, even
apart fro;n the story of the rape, belong to her. He is a Chthonian
god, and, like all the children of the earth, has an element of sad-
ness j like Hades himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of
man^s flesh, aarcophagm^ the grave which consumed unaware the
ivory-white shoulder of Pelops.

' And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of this image than a
certain perc^tible shadow comes growing over the whole story ; for
in effectwe^ve seen glimpses of the sorrowing Dionysus all along.

A BTUBT OP Diomrsus.

760

Part of the interest of the Theban legend of his birth is that he
comes of the marriage of a god with a mortal woman ; and from the
firsti like merely mortal heroes, he comes within the sphere of human
chances. At first, indeed, the melancholy settles round the person
of his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the glory of her
son ; in shame, according to Euripides ; punished, as her own sisters
allege, for impiety. The death of Semele is a sort of ideal or type
of this peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of Persephone
into Hades, of all human pity over the early death of women.
Accordingly, his triumph being now consummated, he descends into
Hades, through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according to
tho most central version, to bring her up from thence; and that
Hermes, the shadowy conductor of souls, is constantly associated
with Dionysus, in the story of his early life, is not without signifi-
cance in this connection. As in Delphi the winter months were
sacred to him, so in Athens his feasts all fall within the four months
on this and the other side of the shortest day, as Persephone is a
third part of tho year in Hades. Son or brother of Persephone he
actually becomes at last, in confused, half-developed tradition ; and
even has his place, x^th his dark sister, in the Eleusinian mysteries,
as lacchus, a prince or a captain of souls ; where, on the sixth day of
the feast, in the great procession from Athens to Eleusis, we may
still realise his image, in that age, with its close connection of
religion and art, presumably fair, moving up and down above the
heads of the vast multitude, as he goes, beside txco^* to the
temple of Demeter, amid the light of torches at noonday.

But it was among the mountains of Thrace that this gloomier
element in tho being of Dionysus had taken the strongest hold. As
in the sunny villages of Attica the cheerful elements of his religion
had been developed, so in those wilder northern regions people
continued to brood over his darker side, and hence a current of
gloomy legend descended into Greece. The subject of the Bacehos
of Euripides is the infatuated opposition of Pontheus, king of Thebes,
to Dionysus and his religion ; his cruelty to the god, whom he shuts
up in prison, and who appears on the stage with his delicate limbs
cruelly bound, but who is finally triumphant ; Pentheus, the man of
grief, being tom to pieces by his own mother, in the judicial mad*
ness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Euripides has only
taken one of ^ many versions of the same story, in all of which
Dionysus is victorious, his enemy being torn to pieces by the sacred
women, or by wild horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold ; or the
msenad Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to pursue for purposes of
lust, suddenly becomes a vine, and binds him down to the earth
inextricably, in her serpentine coils.

In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his enemies by
repaying them in kind. But a deeper vein of poetry pauses at the

770

A SIUBY OF Diomrsxjs.

sorrow^ and in the conflict does not too soon anticipate, thd final
iriumpli. It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufierings.
Hence, in many forms, reflexes . of all the various phases of his
wintry existence, the image of Dionysus Zagreus, the Hunter — of
Dionysus in winter — storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills,
from which, like Ares and Boreas, he ^ originally descends into
Ghreece; the thought of the hunter concentrating into itself aU
men’s forebodings at the departure of the year at its richest, and
the death of all sweet things in the long-continued cold^ when the
sick and the old and little children, ga2dng out morning after
morning on the dun sky, can hardly believe in .the return any more
of a bright day. Or he is connected with the fears, dangers, hard-
ships of the hunter himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home,
in the dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so
ardently ; becoming in his chacc almost akin to the wild beasts — ^to
the wolf, who comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of his
bitterest enemies, and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in
the true intention of the myth. This transformation, this image
of the beautiful soft creature become an enemy of human kind,
putting off himself in his madness, wronged by his own fierce
hunger and thirst, and haunting, with terrible sounds, the high
Thracian farms, is the most tragic note of the whole picture, and
links him on to one of the gloomiest creations of later romance, the
were-wolf, the belief in which still lingers in Grreece as in France,
where it seems to become incorporate in the darkest of all romantic
histories, that of Gilles de Ketz.

And now we see why the tradition of human sacrifice lingered on
in Greece in connection with Dionysus, as a thing of actual detail,
and not remote, so that Dionysius of Halicarnassus counts it among
the horrors of Greek religion. That the sacred women of Dionysus
ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and drank blood, is a fact often
mentioned, and commemorates, as it seems, the actual sacrifice of a
fair boy torn in pieces, fading at last into a symbolical offering. At
Delphi, the wolf vras preserved for him, on the principle by which
. Venus loves the dove, and Hera peacocks ; and there were places in
which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him, a certain mimic pursuit of
the priest who had offered it represented the still surviving horror
of one who had thrown a child to the wolves. The three daughters
of Minyas devote themselves to his worship; they cast lots, and
one of them offers her own tender infant to be tom by the three,
like a roe ; then the other women pursue them, and they are turned
into bats, or moths, or other creatures of the night. And fable is
endorsed by history, Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of
J^alamis, Themistocles offered three Persian captive youths to
'Dionjrsus the Hetmrer.

As, th^, some put tjieir fears of winter into Persephone, so others

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.

into Dionysus^ a deyonring god^ whose sinister side, as the best wine
itself has its treacheries, is illustrated in the dark and shameful secret
society, described by Livy, in which his worship ended at Borne,
abolished by solemn act of the senate. He becomes a new Aidoneus,
a hunter of men’s souls ; like him, to be appeased only by costly
sacrifices.

And then, Dionysus recovering from his mid-winter madness,
how intensely these people conceive the spring! It is that
triumphant Dionysus, cured of his great malady, and sane in the
clear light of the longer days, that Euripides in the Bacchm sets
before us ; still really Zagreus ; though he keeps the red streams and
tom flesh away from the delicate body of the god, in his long vesture
of white and gold, and fragrant with all Eastern odours.^ Of this I
hope to speak in another paper ; let me conclude this by one phase
more of religious custom.

If Dionysus, like Persephone, has his gloomy side, like her he
has also a peculiar message, for a certain number of refined minds,
seeking, in the later days of Greek religion, such modifications of the
old my thus as may minister to ethical culture, to the perfecting of
the moral nature. A type of second birth, from first to last, he opens
in his series of annual changes, for minds looking out for it, the hope
of a possible analogy between the resurrection of nature, and something
yet unrealised, reserved for human souls ; and the beautiful weeping
creature, vexed by the wind, suffering, tom to pieces, rejuvenescent
again, like a tender shoot of living green, out of the hardness and
stony darkness of the earth, becomes an emblem, or ideal of chasten-
ing, and purification, and of final victory, through suffering. It is
the finer, mystical sentiment of the few, projected from the coarser
and more material religion of the many, and accompanying it,
through the course of its history, as its ethereal, less palpable, life-
giving soul, and, as always happens, seeking the quiet, and not too
anxious to make itself felt. With some unfixed, though real, place
in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase of the worship
of Dionysus had its special development in the Orphic literature
and mysteries. Obscure as are these followers of the mystical.
Orpheus, we yet certainly see them, moving and playing their part in
the later ages of Greek religion. Old friends with new faces, though
they had, as Plato witnesses, their less worthy aspect, in appeals to
vulgar, superstitious fears, they seem to have been not without the
charm of a real, inward religious beauty, with their neologies, their
new readings of old legends, their sense of mystical second meanings,
as they refined upon themes grown too familiar, linking, in a
sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this, wc may perhaps liken
them to the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages, with their florid,
romantic theology beyond the bounds of orthodox tradition, and

VOL. XX. K.S. 3 F

77 !^

A STUDY OY DIONYSUS.

giving BO much Dew matter to art and poetry. They are even a
picturesque addition to the exterior of Ghreek life, with their white
dressesi their dirges, their fastings and ecstasies, their outward
asceticism and material purifications. And the central object of
their worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted, slflin god,
the suffering Dionysus, of whose mythus they have their own
qpecial, mystical, esoteric version. That version, embodied in a
supposed Orphic poem, the Occultation of Dtonyme, is represented
only by the details that have passed from it into the almost endless
IHonywaca of fTonnus, a writer of the fourth century ; and the
imagery has to bo put back into the shrine, bit by bit, and finally
incomplete. Its central point is the picture of the rending to pieces
of a divine child, of whom a tradition, scanty indeed, but harmonious
in its variations, had long maintained itself. It was in memory of
it, that those, initiated into the Orphic mysteries, tasted of the raw
flesh of the sacrifice, and thereafter ate no flesh more ; and it con-
nected itself with a strange object in the Delphic shrine, the grave
of Dionysus, a sort of coffin, or cinerary urn, with the inscription.
Sere lieth the body of Dionyme, the son of Semele ; which stood near
the golden image of Apollo, and the sacred tripod on which the
Pyihia sat to prophesy.

Son, first, of Zeus and Persephone, whom Zeus woos in the form of
a serpent, the white, golden-haired child, the best-beloved of his
father, and destined by him to bo the ruler of the world, grows up
in secret. But one day, Zeus, departing on a journey, in his great
fondness for the child delivered to him his crown and staff, and so
left him, shut in a strong tower. Then it came to pass that the
jealous Hera sent out the Titans against him. They approached the
crowned child, and with all sorts of playthings enticed him away,
to have him in their power, and thereupon miserably slew him,
hacking his body to pieces, as the wind tears the vine, with the axe
PekkuSf which, like the swords of’Boland and Arthur^ has its proper
name. The fragments of the body they boiled in a great cauldron,
and made an impious banquet upon them, afterwards carrying the
bones to Apollo, whose rival the young child should have been,
thinking to do him service therein. But Apollo, in great pity for
this his youngest brother, laid the bones in a grave within his own
holy place. Meanwhile, Hera, full of her vengeance, brings to Zeus
the heart of the child, which she had snatched, still beating, from
the hands of the Titans. But Zeus delivered the heart to Semele ; and
the soul of the child remaining awhile in Hades, where Demeter made
for it new fledi, thereafter was bom of Semele, a second Zagrens, the
younger, or Theban, Dionysus.

Waltbe H. Patsb.

(2b he (mtinued.)

ARTHUE SCHOPENHAUER.

The reaction of morbid disappointment wbicb followed the French
Revolution has left its traces in history and literature ; traces too
deep and too universally diffused to be accounted for by the idiosyn-
crasies of individuals. The note of religious scepticism, of negation
absolute and relentless, had been struck by the mighty hand of Ooethe ;
Byron chimed in with the shrill laugh of self-consuming irony,
Leopardi with the liarmonious tones of his beautiful sadness. Alf r^
de Musset, Lenau, Heine, Poushkin, Petofi, followed at intervals, and
in countries widely remote from each other, but all were pervaded
by the same sense of grief and scattered illusion. What appeared
to them as their individual grief, caused by individual misfortune,
was in reality the “ grief of the world,” WeltselmerZf as one amongst
their number has significantly called it.

Schopenhauer is the philosophical exponent of the psychic condi-
tions thus indicated.* In the polished surface of his prose the dark-
ness' of despair becomes more intense, more tangible. With a power
of language, sometimes more poetic than poetry itself, he combines
trenchant sharpness of logical reasoning. With these formidable
weapons he attacks the stronghold of your most cherished illusions,
and scatters to the winds not only your hopes and beliefs but your
very desire of personal happiness. It is this feature of his system
which, chiming in with the general mood of his age, has given
Schopenhauer a popularity far beyond that usually awarded to
abstract philosophers. Yet it seems to mo that the idea of morbid
pessimism which Schopenhauer’s friends and enemies love to associate
with his name is not organically connected with the great results of
his speculative research. The fuller explanation of this seeming
paradox, against which I have no doubt the cry of heresy, philistinism,
and other complimentary epithets will be raised by the fanatics of
the school, I must leave to a later occasion. Suffice it to say here
that I am not alluding to the mere protest against that silly optimism
which believes the laws and wonders of the cosmos to have beCn
arranged by a loving providence for the especial benefit of the human
race. In this latter sense Schopenhauer idiares the appellation of
pessimist with Voltaire and overy great thinker of old and modem
times.

I have called Schopenhauer the philosophical exponent of the
^period of disappointed exhaustion subsequent to the exciting events
of the revolutionary epoch. It must, however, not be thought that
he himself took a particularly lively interest in the political side of

3f2

774

ABTHUB SCHOPENHAUEB.

the queRtion, or was moved to patriotic indignation by tbe subjection
of bis country to I^apoleon’s iron will. Scbopenbauer was all bis
life a stranger to national predilections, and amidst tbe noise of tbe
invading French army preserved sufficient equanimity to work out
one of bis most abstruse metaphysical problems. There is, however,
a strongly personal element in bis philosophy, as there is indeed in
all philosophy of a truly creative order. Schopenhaher is a sulijeetioe
philosopher, xar ; the connection between his life and his

work is intimate and inseparable. A brief sketch of the former
will therefore be necessary before the exposition of his philosophic
labour can be entered upon.

Arthur Schopenhauer was bom February 22, 1788, at Danzig, at
that time a free city of the German Empire. His father was a
wealthy merchant, and one of the most important citizens of the
small Bepublic, to whose institutions he was passionately attached.
When, in 1793, Danzig was annexed to Prussia, he emigrated to
Hamburg, regardless of heavy pecuniary losses incurred by the
change of domicile. The elder Schopenhauer was altogether a
remarkable man, free from the narrow prejudices of his country and
time, and far above the ordinary level of culture common amongst
his class. He paid prolonged visits both to France and England,
and for the free government of the latter country he entertained the
highest regard. It was indeed his intention to give to his hoped-
for son and heir the privilege of English citizenship, for which
purpose he took his wife to London during her pregnancy. Her
weak health, however, obliged him to return home, and to this
circumstance alone it is duo that England cannot add to the
names of Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley that of the greatest thinker
of the present century. In spite of this mischance the younger
Schopenhauer inherited from his father a strong predilection for the
language and institutions of this country. He was perfectly familiar
with the great works in its literature, and quotes the English
philosophic writers, both of the past and present, with a frequency
and knowledge not commonly found among German scholars. Even
the more familiar idiom of the English language he mastered to an
astonishing degree, owing perhaps not a little to his daily habit of
reading the Times newspaper, which had been strongly recommended
to him by his father ; ** because from that paper,’’ the elder Schopen-
hauer ui^ to say, one can learn everything worth knowing.” At
one time Schopenhauer seriously thought of undertaking, or at least
supervising, the translation into English of Eant’s works ; and I
have seen a long and elaborate letter on Goethe’s theory of colour,
writien by him to Sir C. Eastiake, in perfectly grammatical and all'
1>ut idiomatic EngliiA.

To return to the elder Schopenhauer, he combined; with his

ABTHUB I9CIH0PEKHAUEB.

776

tBxcellent gifts as a merchant and man of the world, some less
desirable peculiarities, which unfortunately were to some extent also
transmitted to his son. Amongst these may be mentioned particularly
a certain morbidness of temperament, frequently intensified to a
paroxysm of dread at some impending calamity. His sudden death,
in 1804, by a fall from the upper storey of his warehouse in
Hamburg, was indeed ascribed by rumour to a fit of despair caused
by some imaginary loss of property. According to our philosopher’s
pet theory, wiU and its appendages, such as temper, passions, and
instincts of volition, are inherited from the paternal parent, while the
mother contributes the softening and guiding light of the intellect.
In his own case this rule holds good with regard to his father, to a*
less extent with regard to his mother. Johanna Schopenhauer is
well known as the author of travels, novels, and other miscellaneous
literature. Married to a man by many years her senior, and for
whom, according to her own confession, she could feel no absorbing
passion, her sentimental nature remained undeveloped. Hence,
perhaps, her perpetual restlessness, to be satisfied only by frequent
change of scenery and friends. Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and
many other political and literary celebrities count among her more
or less casual acquaintances. Her more permanent connection at a
later period with Goethe and the Weimar circle is well known to
the student of literature. According to all accounts she seems to
have been an amiable nature, open to now impulses and affections,
but wanting in depth. This impression is* confirmed by her works,
which are amusing and full of observation, but without literary merit
in a higher sense. Her relations to her son will have to be men-
tioned in the further course of these remarks.

Being the only son of a rich merchant, Schopenhauer’s early
education was naturally arranged with a view to his adopting his
father’s profession. The international principle was at the same
time strictly adhered to, the very name of Arthur being chosen
because its spelling is identical in the English, French, and German
languages. At the age of nine he was. sent to one of his father’s
mercantile friends at Havre, with whose son he contracted a tender
friendship. When after two years he returned to Germany he had
become, in accordance with his father’s intention, a perfect French-
man, and spoke his own language with difB.culty.

About this time the first decided signs of aversion to his mercan-
tile pursuits began to show themselves, much to the mortification of
the elder Schopenhauer. The boy expressed an ardent desire for
some scientific calling, too ardent and too persistent to be withstood
by force. Milder forms of resistance were applied. The choice was
left to the youth between entering at once a gymvmium (preparatory
school for the university), and accompanying his parents on a tour

776

abxhtjb schopsnbatthb.

tliToiigh Eu;rope ; tire meeting again of liis Mend in Hayre being
beld out as an additional attraotion in the latter project. Affection
and curiosity at last prevailed over scientific aspiration. In 1803 the
Schopenhauers started for England, where their stay was prolonged
over six monthly during which time the parents made a tour to
Scotland, while Arthur was left at the boarding-school of a clergy-
man in Wimbledon, near Londbn. It was here that Schopenhauer
acquired his perfect knowledge of the English language, and it
was here also that he first imbibed the almost fanatical hatred of
English bigotry frequently vented in his writings. In a letter to
his parents written at this time he exclaims with boyish emphasis.
Oh that the torch of truth might bvm through these darknesses !

In her reply the mother gently sympathises with him on account of
. the large dose of Christianity ho is made to swallow. A good deal
of Schopenhauer’s bitterness against Anglicanism and other modem
developments of the Christian faith ought in fairness to be charged
to the Wimbledon parson.

On their way back the family passed through Switzerland, where
the grandeur of the Alps left a lasting impression on the young philo-
sopher, delightful traces of which are discernible in his writings.

About a year after his return to Hamburg, the prospects of
Schopenhauer’s career were essentially changed by the sudden
death of his father. For a short time he continued, from a feeling of
piety, the career chosen for him by his deceased parent ; but soon the
longing for higher aims became irresistible, and, at a comparatively
advanced age, he entered upon a thorough course of classical training.
He used to tell in later years, with justified pride, that he began
his study of Latin at the age of ninet^n, and acquired the language
// in six months. It ought to be added that as a Greek and Latin
scholar he had few superiors in Germany, besides which he spoke
French, English, and Italian with perfect ease, and translated a
book from the Spanish. ’ ^

In 1807 Schopenhauer joined his mother at Weimar, to complete
his preparatory studies for the university under the celebrated
Passow. Johanna Schopenhauer and her daughter Adele had by this
time become general favourites with the Weimar celebrities. Not
long after the death of her husband, the widow had removed
to the intellectual centre of Germany. She arrived just before the
battle of Jena and the Occupation of Weimar by the French troops^
and the anxious days passed with her new acquaintances greatly
furthered their intimacy. In his mother’s drawing-room Schopen-
hauer met such men as Goethe, Wieland, Grimm, Prince PiicUer,
and the two Scblegels, all attracted by the lively conversation and
hoi^itali^ of the. charming widow. Arthur, however, did
i*eside with his mother. For at this period already the insuper*
' able antagonism of tiieir natures had become apparent.

AETHUB SGHOPENHAUEE.

777

MuoIl has been said an^ written about the imfortanate quarrdl
between mother and son^ and particularly the. conduct of the latter
has been severdy commented upon. There were undoubtedly faults
on both sides, but the ultimate cause of their dissension lay too deep
to be measured by the ordinary , scale of moral responsibilities. The
differences of character were radical ; no amount of mutual bearing
and forbearing could have prevented the continual grating and
clashing of these antagonistic natures. Johanna Schopenhauer’s
character has already been sketched in outline. We can imagine
her at Weimar, basking in the sun of a small court, hero-worshipping
in a mild way, retailing sentiment and small-talk, writing love-
stories for the almanacs, wholly occupied and contented with the
enjoyment of the hour. On the other hand we see the youth, full of
thought, pondering over problems of dcepest'import, imbued with the
sadness that accompanied his genius, solitary in the crowd, and too
proud to hide his contempt of its petty cares and interests. HoW could
harmony spring from such a union ? Let us see how the mother
herself states her case, not unfairly from her own point of view.

** It is uocessary for my happinoBS,” she writes to Arthur, to know that you
are happy, but not to witness it. 1 have always told you how difficult it is to
Hye with you, and the more 1 consider you, the more this difficulty seems to
increase, at least as far as I am concerned. Indeed, I confess, as long as you
are what you aro, I would sooner *make any sacrifice than bring my mind to it.
I do not deny your good qualities, and what repels me does not lie in your
heart, not in your internal but in your external being, that is, your opinions,
your utterances, your habits; in short, our views of life totally disagree.
Moreover, your moroseness, your complaints about inevitable things, your dark
faces, youi* bizarre assertions resembling oracular utterances, against which
one is not allowed to say anything — all this oppresses and disturbs my good
humour without being of any use to yourself. Your unpleasant manner of dis-
cussion, your lamentations over this stupid world and the misery of mankind,
give mo bad nights and evil dreams.”

Spoken like a woman of the world, but decidedly wanting in that
motherly love which endures and forgives, or indeed in that
womanly intuition which discerns the signs of maturing genius in
the morbid symptoms of boyish arrogance or despondency. The
entire absence of appreciation of hejr son’s great intellectual power
on the part of Johanna Schopenhauer is painfully discernible in
her whole conduct, and could not but irritate the proud spirit of the
youth. When, at a later period, he presented to his mother the
first-fruit of his philosophic labour, she thanked him with a bad
joke, which elicited an angry retort on his part. Other circum-
stances of a graver nature added fuel to the flame of discord.
Schop^hauer accused his mother of neglecting the memory of his
father^ and his indignation came to a climax when by her mis-
managemjsnt he found himself in danger of being deprived of his
moderate competency. Schopenhauer at no time of his life was a
miser in the ordinaiy sense ; his extreme liberality on idl occasions.

7?8

AttTHUE 6GH0PENHA.UER.

where cliarity was needed by rektiona or strangers sufficiently
proves the contrary. But he justly regarded moderate wealth as
the safeguard of his scientific independence. To make his philo-
sophy lucrative, or, what is the same, agreeable to the powers that
be, he felt himself equally unable and unwilling. The loss of his
proi)erty was therefore one of those calamities which he dreaded
with that all but insane terror inherited from his father and vainly
combated by reason. In this case, moreover, his apprehensions
proved but too well founded. On the breaking of a bank at
Danzig, to which his mother had entrusted her money without
security, she lost almost the whole of her own and her ^ughter’s
property. Schopenhauer himself escaped serious loss only by
previous caution and a great effort of energy when his suspicion
became realised.

I have mentioned these circumstances at some length, because
from them I derive a grave defect in Schopenhauer’s thought and
feeling — ^the want of love. His nature was undoubtedly sad, and
little tending towards a charitable view of men’s faults.* But we all
know how such harshnesses may be toned down and the sting
taken out of them by the tender sympathy of a refined woman ;
much more of a loving and beloved mother. With such infiuences
brought to bear upon him in early youth, Schopenhauer would
perhaps never have become an amiable member of society, with a
talent for taking things pleasantly ; but I doubt whether his
cynicism of despair and his misanthropy, or cataphronanthropy
as he preferred to call it, would ever have been developed to the
degree now so painfully observable in his works.

Another by no means pleasant feature of Schopenhauer’s writings
— ^traceable, I think, to the same unfortunate circumstances — ^is the
low opinion he holds, or pretends to hold, of woman. Personally,
the philosopher was by no means insensible to the charms of love.
We hear of a tender attachment which retained him in Venice for
many months ; and of Madame Jagemann, the beautiful actress in
Weimar, he exekimed enthuskstically, should have liked to
marry this woman if I had found her breaking stones on the high
road.” Nevertheless, he takes a pride in vilifying the sex collec-
tively wherever an occasion offers. The chapter, XJeber die
Weiber, in the second volume of Farerga und Paralipomena, con-
tains the most caustic remarks on female weaknesses that ever
from a misogynist’s pen. Byron, Chamfort, and Huarte, Eastern
and Western sages, are ransacked, and supplemented by the author’s
own observations, in a manner exceedingly amusing but for its
ooeanonal coarseness and for the feeling, which never leaves the
rSader, that all this savage raillery is but the discord of a sensitive
nature marred by personal misfortune.

ABTHUB S0H0PENHA.I7EB.

779

Woman, according to Schopenhauer, is omphatically the No. 2
of the human race, inferior to man in mental, moral, and physical
capabilities. From her subordinate position in antique and Eastern
life she has been removed by Old French gallantry and "Ger-’
mano-Christian idiocy” to a sphere of artificial equality with,
nay, superiority to man. Hence the intolerable arrogance of the,
**lady” of modem civilisation. Woman is entirely incapable of
large conception, her range of vision being circumscribed by the
narrowest bounds of subjective feeling. She always remains a
child, and ought never to be wholly withdrawn from the guardian-
ship of man, be it father, husband, or son ; nothing can be more
monstrous than to leave children and their inheritance to the
care of their mother (this sentence in Schopenhauer’s mouth is, alas !
but too significant). Not even the appellation of ** fair ” is conceded
to the sex courteously so denominated. It ought to be changed into
“ unaBsthetical.” For the love of art frequently affected by women
is in reality but a means of‘ attracting the admiration of men.
Unselfish enthusiasm is altogether above their nature.

So much of this unpalatable mixture of much error and a faint
spark of truth,” in which the intellect of a great man has run
to waste in the most deplorable manner. Fortunately for us and
Schopenhauer, these whimsical lucubrations have no connection
whatever with the essence of his doctrine, and need therefore not
detain us longer.

In 1809 Schopenhauer went to the University of Gottingen, where
he studied chiefly physical science, history, and philosophy, and
became intimate with his fellow-student Baron Bunsen. In 1811
the fame of the celebrated Fichte attracted him to Berlin; his
d priori admiration of that philosopher, however, soon turned to.
contempt, caused partly by the hollow emptiness of his doctrine,
partly by the sham pathos with which such oracular phrases as It
is, because it is as it is,” were delivered. Schleieimacher, the second
star of the university, did not fare much better at our philosopher’s
hands, who shortly but significantly describes him as a ” parson ”
{Pfaffe). His utter contempt for Hegel and the official philosophers
of his training is but too well known to the most occasional reader of
Schopenhauer. It will be best at once to comprehend, and have done
with, this unpleasant subject.

Leaving the absolute merits of Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and other
philosophers undecided, it is impossible to deny that the abuse scat-
tered upon them broadcast by Schopenhauer is, to say the least, in
exceedingly bad taste. According to him theprofessional sages holding
the philosophical chairs in German universities are, with few if any
exceptions, a mercenary crew, thinking and expounding exactly
what their paymaster the Government tells them to think and

7S0, ABTHTJB SCHOPXNHAtJEB.

expound. *'Piriinum mere deinde philoeophari^* is their supreme
maxim^ to which all scruples of conscience^ personal or scientific,
have to yield. Hegel, the arch*humbug, is the inventor of this
official state-philosophy. The pure doctrine of Hant appears
hideoudy distorted in his writings, in so far as they can be said to
convey any meaning at all. For it is his chief trick {Kniff) to
cover his ignorance and want of genius with a veil of obscure phrase-
ology at which the reader stands aghast, doubtful whether his own
. or the writer^s reasoning faculties are at fault. The smaller firy —
Schopenhauer continues — ^are naturally leagued together by common
fears and interests. Members of their clique are systematically cried
up, while outsiders — that is, non-Profcssoren der Fhilosophie, or,
indeed, all original thinkers — are as invariably abused or silenced
to death. Here, again, we touch upon personal' grounds. It is
well known how Schopenhauer’s chief work was for a long time
utterly neglected by professional critics. But let us not for that
reason ascribe his undoubtedly exaggerated animadversions to the
vulgar spite of an unsuccessful writer. An original thinker may
claim a commensurate share of notice, favourable or unfavourable, and
the withholding of this notice in periodicals which, at the same time,
lavished praises on mediocrities of their own school, looks remark-
ably like what lawyers call malice prepense. In such a case the
argument e rilentiOy so generally and so justly suspected by the his-
torian, is stronger than volumes of positive evidence ; and great
allowance ought to be made for a proud nature retaliating in a style
not always strictly within the bounds of literary decorum. It is,
moreover, impossible to deny that many of Schopenhauer’s charges,
although too sweeping in their application, are undoubtedly founded
on truth. It is certain that much teaching of official philosophy has
been and is still going on at German universities ; equally certain
that many of the chairs in these universities have been for a long
time monopolised by more or less slavish disciples"*bf Hegel. Nor
can any reader of t^t philosopher’s works blind himself to the fact
that many of his high-soupding sentences contain a comparatively
small resid^m of sense ; nay, that he systematically invented a
language abominable with regard to style, and detrimental to science
by the easy opportunity it offers to the dullard of clothing his com-
monplaces in the garb of unfathomable wisdom. Schopenhauer
instinctively abhorred obscurity or timid duplicity of any kind. His
intellect is piercing, and his language lucid and forrible to a degree
attained by few German writers, philosophic or otherwise. Friends
and enendes admit him to be one of the greatest masters of German
tfmse anoe Goethe, and no one at all familiar with metaphysical
'^'^estions can foil to perceive the gist of his reasoning. It is, indeed,
4me of Sdiopenhauer’s greatest merits to have divested philosophical

ABXH.UB SCEOPENHAUBB.

781

Bcience of the cant of the schoolroom, and he might have justly
applied to himself those admirable words occurring in a letter fipom
Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the palm is awarded to those philoso-
phers « who strip metaphysics of all their bombast, keep within the
bounds of .every well-constituted eye, and never bewilder themselves
whilst they pretend to guide the reason of others/'

After these remarks the candid reader must decide what amount
of violence ought to be deemed justifiable, or at least excusable, in
an ardent lover of truth who happens to be at the same time a man
of transcendent genius. Only one more circumstance — ^not hitherto
sufficiently attended to by German critics — should like to mention,
which in some measure seems to account for the personal aversion
felt by our philosopher almost at first meeting to both Fichte and
Hegel. Schopcnliauer, as we have seen, was by descent and educa-
tion a gentleman and man of the world. He had seen many men's
cities, and could converse on equal terms of social ease, and in their
own languages, with the Frenchman, the Englishman, the Italian.
At the same time he was extremely sensitive, and felt the want
of 'that perfume and charm of life, good manners, with more than
ordinary acuteness. Now the German professor, as a rule, does,
or at least did not at that time, count the graces amongst his
numerous accomplishments, and neither Hegel nor Fichte was in
this respect above the level of their class. I am far from believing
that Schopenhauer would under any circumstances have become an
admirer of Hegel's Absolute Reason, or of Fichte's Absolute I;
but that the concrete I of the professor did not to some extent
intensify the odiousness of that other transcendental ego I am by no
means prepared to affirm.

Returning now to our philosopher's career, we find that his quiet
studies at Berlin have been interrupted by the threatening approach
of the French army after the battle of Liit^en. Schope^auer
retired to a secluded village in Saxony, where he finished his philo-
sophic treatise, Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureich*
^nden Gxunde, a careful and profound investigation of the law of
causality in its various applications, on the ground of which he
received his degree as Doctor of Philosophy from the University
of Jena. The winter of 1813-14 he passed in Weimar, where the
mighty individuality of Gh)ethe exercised its potent spell on the
young philosopher. The poet was at that time chiefly occupied with
his theory of colours, and was delighted to find an intelligent listener
to his favourite doctrine. Schopenhauer soon afterwards published
a brochure, in which, with due respect for Goethe’s experimental
research and genius, the imperfections of his theory from a phRo-
Bophic point of view are candidly laid bare. The reciprocal benefits
derived by» these two great men from their temporary intimacy were

782

ABTHUB 8CHOPENHAT7EB,

naturally not of equal value. Goethe’s character and intellect at
that time were too firmly established to receive strong impulses
from new ideas, however potent; but to Schopenhauer the poet
appeared as the highest type of perfect manhood, whose genius he
worshipped to the last with never-abating enthusiasm. Gbethe,
however, did by no means fail to appreciate the great powers of his
younger friend's mind. He speaks of him as ** a remarkable bead,”

difficult to recognise ; ” and the almost melancholy resignation with
which he mentions the young philosopher’s dissent from his theory
on important points, shows how he felt the loss of such u proselyte.
Some years later, when Schopenhauer’s chief work appeared, —

** Goethe received it with great pleasure ” (I quote from a letter of Adele
Schopenhauer to her brother, then in Italy), ** cut the thick volume in two, and
began reading it immediately. After an hour ho sent me the inclosed bit of
paper, and bade me tell you that ho is greatly obliged to you, and believes the
wWe book to be good. Being always successful in opening books at the most
remarkable places, he found and read with great pleasure the two passages
marked by him ” (viz. on the piece of paper alluded to ; one of these passages
the reader shall see in the following). . . . ** He says he is looking forward to
a whole year’s pleasure, for he is going to read it from beginning to end, and
. thinks that time will bo necessary. . . . He particularly likes in your book the
clearness of exposition and style, although, he says, your language is dif-
ferent from that of other people, and one must get used to calling things by the
names you want them to have ; but after having once learned that a horse is
not called horse, but cavallo, and God perhaps Dio^ or something else, one can
read well and easily. ... I hope soon to see him again alone, and perhaps to
hear something more satisfactory. You, at least, are the only author whom
Goethe reads in this manner and with so much serious interest.”

Whether this more satisfactory communication was ever received
we cannot tell ; certain it is that Schopenhauer suspected Goethe of
never having finished the book.

It was also during this stay at Weimar that Schopenhauer deeply
entered into the spirit of Old Indian wisdom and religion. Together
with Plato, Kant, and some of the French and English philosophers
of the eighteenth century, the holy books of Buddhism were at once
the favourite companions of his leisure hours and the objects of his
most arduous thought.

In the spring of 1814 Schopenhauer left Weimar for Dresden,
where he remained for the next four years mainly occupied with
the composition of the great work of his^life. He wrote with the
eagerness and absorption of a youthful mind confident of its own
power, and driven to utterance by what Goethe would have called
dsomonic impulse. He himself in his old age looked back with
mdpicholy regret on the fervid inspiration of his youth, saying that
liie work impressed him like that of another man. In the autumn
of 1818 the manuscript was in the printer’s hands, and the author
on his way. to Italy. Perhaps he wished to avoid tho annoyance

ASTBTJR 6CEOPBNHAX7EB.

788

of adverse criticism; perlmps lie looked forward to tke surprise of a
great success on his return. In either case his expectations remained
unfulfilled. The “World as Will and Bepresentation/’ ^ undoubt-
edly the greatest production of abstract philosophy since Bant, was
received by contemporary criticism with all but unbroken silence.
A few insignificant notices appeared in the newq)apers, and Jean
Paul Friedrich Bichter^ with die instinct of the poet, recognised the
kindred flame in Schopenhauer, whose work he compares to “ a deep
melancholy lake in Norway, surrounded by a darkr wall of steep
rocks, which never reflects the sun, but, in its depth, the starred sky
at mid-day.’’ None of the renowned philosophers of the day con-
descended ^to utter a word of recognition or even of blame, with
the honourable exception of Herbert, who, although diametrically
opposed to his doctrine, acknowledged the importance of Schopen-
hauer’s system. Commercially, the book was a dead failure, and
when, in 1844, the author reissued his ^ work with a second sup-
plementary volume, the greater part of the first edition was
unsold.

Schopenhauer in the meantime revelled in the beauties of Italian
art and nature. Antique sculpture and architecture he worshipped
in preference to mediaeval developments ; to the beauties of painting,
of colour in particular, he seems to have been comparatively less
sensible. Of Italian poets he most admired Petrarch, while Dante
appeared to him too didactic, and Boccaccio a mere conteur, to whose
world-wide fame he could never reconcile himself. His love of
modem Italian music, and its most gifted representative, Bossini,
also dates from this .period. At the same time he tasted the
brimming cup of life’s pleasure. At Venice he lingered in the
bondage of love ; in Borne and Naples he freely mixed in the
society of young Italians and Englishmen, his command of many
languages acting as an introduction to the most distinguished circles.
Surely this man, with his strong individuality, his wide sympathy,
his aristocratic bearing, was not fit to be a yoke-feUow of the ordi-
nary pedant of a German lecture-room. Yet such for a time seemed
to be his destiny. Alarmed by the threatened loss of his property,
already alluded to, Schopenhauer returned to Germany with a view
to some lucrative employment as a haven of refuge in case of

need. In the spring of 1820 he began a course of lectures on
philosophy in the University of Berlin, at that time the scene of
Hegel’s and Schleiermacher’s triumphs. Be it that this competition
proved too powerful for the young beginner, or that the nature of

(1) The German title is “ Die Welt ala Wille and Voxstellimg.*’ In former quotations
of the book I have Englidied the last word by Ihuigination,” being guided more
the idU^tio peonliaxitieB of the two languages than by the rules of philofophio
temdiiology. ‘ But the conmtut doctorum does not support my suggestion.

784

ABCBtm Bmxmskvm.

Ha syBtam was fotmd unpaktaUe, certain it is tliat SeHopenltauer’s
anooess aB^alecinreT did not inattyi^way surpass that of Hs literaiy
efforts. Perhaps Hs failure nm 'mainly due to his own want (ff
diplomatie reticence. He always had Ihe courage, one might almost
say the recklessness, of Hs opinion, and in his inaugural lecture he
boldly inTeighed against the sophists who, by their obscure, barbarous
language had 'fatigued and blunted the zeal for philosophic study
roused by Kant’s mighty speculations. Such allusions, but too well
understo^ in the proper quarters, were of course not likely to rouse
beneyolent feeling in official bosoms. Altogether the atmosphere of
« Berlin, physical and intellectual and social, was not to the taste of
Schopenhauer, and his stay in the university, which lasted with
many interruptions more than ten years, was productive of little
scientific result and of less personal enjoyment. Much' of the morbid
bitterness in his later writings may be traced to the many disappoint-
ments of tHs period.

In 1831 he left Berlin definitely, the immediate cause being the
approach of the cholera, one of the bugbears of Schopenhauer’s
fancy, which on a former occasion had driven him in mod flight
from one city to another. Two years later he settled in Frankfort-
on-the-Main, never to leave it again except on short journeys. His
life there was one of almost absolute seclusion. He had no friends,
and did not wish to make any ; his interest in local afEairs was null ;
and although he dined at the table-d’hote of the best hotel, he seldom
engaged in conversation, or, if he did, was soon silenced again by
the commonplace replies he received in nine cases out of ten. For
Hs talk, although never dull or abstruse, was always on high
questions of literature, art, or philosophy. Small talk in the ordi-
nary sense he despised. The only companions of his solitude were
Hs poodle and his books. With the former he lived on terms of
intimacy, observing with keen interest its canine individuality;
only in cases of exceptional ill-behaviour the opproFrious epithet of
^^mon” was appKed to it Beading was the main occupation of
Schopenhauer’s life, for he did not write much, and only when
urged by real inspiration. The results of Hs thought and study,
noted down on pieces of paper, were carefully .classified and kept in
separate books. Each of these books or parcels had a label attached
to it indicative of the contents, or of the time and circumstances of
their origin. Some of these titles are curious, and characteristic
of the author ; fer instance, TraveUing-lmk,” Oogitata,”

Spioilegia,” ^^Senilia,” ^^Cholera^book” (that is, ]^ok written on
Hs, flight from the cholera), and the like. In this extreme accuracy,
wJ^ also extended to ^e keeping of his ^counts, we recognise
the merchant’s son.

The treasim of information acquired by Hs unweazying study

ABTHUB SGHQPENHATJXR.

785 .

Si^opeahaoer at long intervals dq>^ted, and gave to tlie worlds in
his l^ks. The chipf labour of his life was done^ and his eystem ,
established. But further to elucidate the single parts of this qrstem,
and to glean new evidence from the various fields of modem scientific
.discovery, Schopenhauer never grew tired, addressing his words to
future generations for want of contemporary listeners. For the
books ^ pubUshed by him for a long time shar^ the &te of his optM
nmgmm ; that is, all but total neglect. His name as an author was
absolutely unknown. Polite people, on being accidentally introduced
to him, used to ask if he was a son of the celeWted Johanna Schopen-
hauer ; much to his disgust one may imagine.

This state of things lasted for eighteen years. In pronouncing
the number, one hardly realises the weary length of time from lonely
day to lonely day ; the contempt of men, the bitterness of disappoint-
ment amassed during such a period in a proud ambitious mind,
vainly trying to spurn the success which fate refused to grant.

This success came at last, and from a quarter from which it had
been least expected, and perhaps most coveted. This quarter was
England. In 1851 Schopenhauer published in two volumes his
Parerga und Paralipomena, best described as a collection of essays
and remarks on a variety of topics more or less closely connected
I with his philosophic system. This work is a mine of deepest
wisdom, and at the same time one of the most entertaining books
ever written. Its literary merits, both as regards manner and
substance, were so striking as to make the policy of silence
hitherto observed by Schopenhauer’s adversaries a matter of impos-
sibility. But the attention thus created would most likely soon
have subsided again had it not b<^n for a foreign voice suddezdy and
loudly rai^d in testimony of the neglected philosopher’s merits.
Such voices are listened to with particular eagerness in Germany.

I am alluding to a paper called Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,
and published in the We^tmimter Review of April, 1853. It soon
transpired that the author was Mr. John Oxenford, the well-known
dramatist, critic, and scholar. The article is masterly in all respects,
combining perfect grasp of the subject with lucid exposition and
interesting treatment. It may be called without exaggeration the
foundation of Schopenhauer’s fame, both in his own and other
countries. For now suddenly the prophet was acknowledged by
his people. The journals began to teem with his praue ; enemies
entered the arena, and were met by champions no less enthusiastic;
and before long the Sage of Frankfort became one of the sights

(1) I labjoin the titles of these unsaccegsfttl worln, with their dates of paUication :

** lleber den Willen in der Natnr," 1836 ; “ Die beiden Gnmdprobleme der Ethik,”
1841 ; second edition of *<Die Welt als Wille nnd Yontdlusg,'’ with an additioi]^ >
second velmne, 1844.

78^

ABXEIJfE SCabPBNHAUSB.

of that anoient and renowned city. Schopenhauer received the
incense so tardily offered at his e^rine with ^ sort of gjrim self-
complacency. Yisitors he treated with politeness, reserving the
protective measures of rudeness and abrupt turning of the back for
extreme cases of boredom or insolence. The following remarks
by an accomplished French writer, M. Foucher de Oareil, by no
means a quand minie admirer of Schopenhauer, convey a lively
picture of the senescent philosopher’s personality and surroundings.

**lloccupait quand je le vis” (in 18d9) rez de chaussee d’une belle
rnaison sur le quai de Bchone AvMicht; sa chambre §tait aussi bibliotb^que.
TJn busto de Goethe y frappait tout d’abord les regards ; une servante et son
caniche formaient toute sa domesticity. . . Sa Tie confortable et simple etait

celle d’uu sage qui se conduit par maximes. Tout y etait rlgiy par une prl-
voyante yconomie de ses forces et de ses ressources. . . . H esp§rait que son
rlgime de saine actiyity le ferait Tivre jusqu’d cent ans, quand la mort le surprit
a soixante-dix [it ought to be soixante-douze] ans. . . . Quand je lo vis pour
la premidre fois a la table de Thotel d’Angloterre a Francfort, c’etait deja
un yieillard, d rccil d’un bleu vif et limpide, d la l^vre mince et legdrement
sarcastique, autour do laquelle errait un fin sourire, et dont le Taste front
estompy de deux touffes de cheyoux blancs sur Ics cotes, releyait d’un cachet
de noblesse et de distinction la physionomio petillanto d’esprit ot do malice.
Ses habits, son jabot de dentelle, sa crayate blanche rappolaient un yieillard de
la fin du rigne de Louis XY. ; ses manidres etaient celles d’un homme de bonno
compagnie. Habituellement ryseryd et d’un naturol craintif jusqu’a la mefianco
il ne se liyrait qu’ayec ses intimes ou les etrangers de passage d Francfort. Ses
mouyements ytaient yifs et deyenaient d’une petulance oxtraordinairo dans la
conyersation. ... 11 possedait et parlait ayec une egale perfection quatre
langues : le fran^ais, I’anglais, I’allemand, I’italion et passablcment I’ospagnol.
Quand il parlait, la yerye du yieillard brodait sur le caneyas un peu lou^ de
I’allemand ses brillantes arabesques latines, grecques, fran 9 aiBos, unglaises,
italiennes. C’ytait un entrain, une prycision ot des saillies, une richesso de cita-
tions, une exactitude do details qui faisaitcouler les heures ; ot quelquofois lo
petit cercle de ses intimes I’ycoutait jusqu’d minuit sans qu’un moment do
fatigue se fdt peint sur ses traits ou que le feu de son regard se fut un instant
amorti. . . . Un allemond qui ayait beaucoup yoyage en Abyssinie, fut ytonne
de I’entendre un jour donner sur les difierentes especes do crocodiles et sur lem's
mceurs des details tellement pryds, qu’il s’imaginait ayoir doyant lui un ancien
compagnon de yoyage.”

For a fuller account of Schopenhauer’s biography and character I
must refer the reader to the valuable work by Dr. Gwinner,^ one of
the few intimate friends of his latter years ; also to the personal
reminiscences of him contained in a work on SchopenhaAier by Drs.
Lindner and Frauenstaedt.

To my own sketch of Schopenhauer’s life I have only to add the
date of his death, September 20th, 1860, and the fact that that
much-desired boon eutMnmia was granted to him. His housekeeper
found him one morning after breakfast reclining on his sofa, lifeless.
D^th had come to bim as a friend indeed, unannounced and unin-
but welcome.

(i) ^Arthur Sehopsidiauer ans penonlichsm Umgaag dargesteUV’ 1862.

AEIHUB SOHOPBNHITOE. 787

Perhaps the reader may think that I have vdth undue length
dwelt upon a life great in purpose but smdl in incident, and ex-
ceedingly sad withal. But it seemed important to trace to their
personal and temporary sources certain features of Schopenhauer’s
work, to which as a rule too much weight is attached in comparison
with the great metaphysical truths first announced in his system.
This system itself I have neither power nor wish to condense within
the limits of a review article. I should indeed refrain from all
attempts at exegesis if the freedom with which I have spoken of the
weaknesses and prejudices of the man did not make it incumbent upon
me to insist with equal emphasis on the transcendent merits of the
philosopher. This shall be done briefly and in a straightforward
manner, without deviatory side-glances at kindred or controversial
phases of contemporary thought, and with as little as possible of that
technical jargon which Schopenhauer himself has so largely suc-
ceeded in supplanting by the language of common sense.

In his Critique of Pure Beason the great Kant has proved
the absolute impenetrability by our knowledge of the essence of
things. Our sensual and intellectual organs are not adapted to such
knowledge. To perceive at all we must attach to the objects of our
perception certain conditions and relations, which in res^ty are the
functions of our own brains, making such perception possible. That
is, in order to become aware of objects, we must regard them in their
sequence after one another (time), in their various positions of
co-existence (space), and finally in their mutual relations of cause and
effect (causality). The ideality {ue. objective non-reality) of time,
space, and causality taught by Kant is the final death-blow of the
d priori dogmatism of former systems. For our intellect (using the
word in the most general sense), limited by the conditions alluded to,
can never go beyond the appearances of things, the phenomena.
To whatever extent the exact sciences may learn the various qualities
of these phenomena, there always remains and must remain a
residuum of unknown essence, independent of space, time, and^
causality, and unaltered and undiminished after all the definable
qualities alluded to (for instance, in the case of matter, weight,
extension, &o.) have been deducted. This unknown essence Kant
calls the thing in itself ” {Ding an sich), thus pronouncing the final
and total bankruptcy of human reason in matters metaphysical. For
what positive idea is it possible to connect with this or the still more
nebulous though grander-sounding terms which later philosophers
have usedP Is not the thing in itself” in reality a decorous
disguise of the great unknowable, the op in the metaphysical equation
of the universe P

Schopenhauer, who thus far has in essentials followed Kant, here
steps in^ |nd solves the riddle of the sphinx by the simple formula—

VOL. XX. N.S. 3 G

788

ABTHtm SOHOPENHATJEB.

X = Will. This transfers ns at once from the indefiniteness of
metaphysLoal terminology to the firm reality of human consciousness.
We recognise the identity of our own being with the essence of all
beings, and the great mystery of the world seems a total mystery no
more. The accession to our store of philosophic knowledge accruing
from Schopenhauer’s discovery seems to me* to be incalculable. To
lay open its source and import to the r^er will now be my task.

All things, Schopenhauer says, we observe and observe only
through the medium of time, space, and causality, with one single
exception— ourselves. It is true that our body, in so far as it lives
and acts, and that which makes our body live and act, our will, are
objects of our own perception m the ordinary sense. But apart from
this perception, we are conscious of a vital principle in ourselves
absolutely identical with the essence of our own being, and quite
independent of and beyond our ordinary means of observation. This
vital principle of the human organism is called Will ; it is ever
present, to our mind, is perceived or rather felt by us inde-
pendently of time, space, or causality ; it is indeed the immanent
essence of our life, the “ Ding an aich ” of our being.^ This recog-
nition of our own being by dint of self-intuition, Schopenhauer
justly calls the only possible metaphysical or philosophic knowledge
in the proper sense of the word. With every change or motion of
this Will, he proceeds to show, a corresponding change in our body is
indissolubly connected. Every movement of our hand, every beat of
our pulse, are the effect of the action of our will, independently of
our own consciousness of such action. Our body itself, with its
nerves and fibres, its blood and its brain, is indeed nothing but this
Will become conscious, and observing itself through the principium
individuationis.

With the aid of this knowledge of our being, we now look at the
world around us to find that the macrocosm of the universe is only
the repetition on a gigantic scale of our own tangible identity.
We perceive an infinity of outward forms, organic and inorganic ;
plants and birds and beasts and men all fashioned after the manner
of our own body, or at least submitting to the same laws of
material existence. The essence or noumenon of our own body we
know to be Will; what, then, can be the one substratum of the
imiverse but the same Will in its various stages of coxisciousness and
individuation ? There is only the alternative between the acceptance
of this reality and the theory of absolute egoism, which, as Schopen-
haute observes, cannot be metaphysically diq^roved, but has never

(1) It is perhaps haidlr necessary to remind the reader of the rital difference be-
«tw«en Will and Volition. Volition is the temporaxy action of the will in accordance
with a putionlST motiTe brought to hear upon it. It is therefore subject to time'and
eauaalityy^a phenomenon in short, while Will is the noumenon or essenoe.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAITEB.

789

T)e6B slriously started out of a madhouse. Will, then, Will one and
uniyersal, eternal and unchangeable in essence, although multiform
in its temporal appearances, is the key-note of the harmony of the
epheres, the essence of which all the wonders of the world, from the
oolossal immoyability of a granite rock to the subtle texture of the
human brain, are only signs' and forms.

Let the reader pause here for a moment to recuse the deep meta-
physical import of this discovery. It establishes the long sought-for
unity of the world, it fills up the chasm formerly dividing mental
•and material forces, and at the same time it enables us, from the
safe retreat of our own existence, to glance fearlessly at the enormous
heaving and struggling of the universe in which we are no more
•entire strangers. It must not be thought that this ideal unity
ean be deduced from any previous system, or that Schopenhauer has
only changed the name of universal Force or Law into WiU.
Of force or law we know nothing, of Will everything ; toe are WilL
Besides, why introduce a difference of term where identity of essence
is all-important P And how are we to know where force ends and
will begins P Organism or consciousness arc no criteria in the matter,
us will be seen presently. Spinoza says of a falling stone, that if it
were conscious it would ascribe its movement to spontaneous action.
Schopenhauer adds that the stone in thinking so would be right.
For the law of gravity to which it obeys, and the motive which
points out to human will the object of its desire, are convertible terms.

But I am anticipating. Natura non facit saltus was one of
Schopenhauer’s favourite maxims. To come from the stone to the
individual action of human will, we must pass through the innumer-
able gradations of inorganic, organic, and animal life. All these
Schopenhauer regards as the various stages of the objectivation ”
— Bit veniu verba— oi the Will. The history of the world is but the
history of the struggle of Will for consciousness and individuaUty.
To attain this it fashions itself into a thousand forms, all tending
towards the same goal, and all reckless of the existence of the lower
types, of which they themselves are further developments. Stone
and plant, animal and man, are the landmarks of this unceasing
current of desire. In man, at last. Will obtains the highest stage of
its objectivation. It becomes object proper because the self-conscious
subject has been created.

This, then, is what we discover in looking at ourselves and the
surrounding world, through the medium of Schopenhauer’s philo-
sophy. Will and interminable desire are the essence of our*
being, and the same desire is at the bottom of the phenomena of
the world. These phenomena themselves, although we recognise
their essence by analogy, surround us with bewildering horror.
Everywhere we see straggle for existence, species devouring species,

3 G 2

790

ABXHUE SCHOPENHATJEB.

race contending against race;^ even the brute earth seething and
bubbling with internal fire ready to burst forth at any moment.
Such is the spectacle of Will in contest with itself, and devouring ita
own children with insatiable hunger. Surely this is not a bright
picture, and Schopenhauer has painted it with the sombrest hues of
despair. He lays bare the revolting cruelty of nature, which at the
cost of inconceivable individual suffering creates new types only to
abandon them again to the universal doom of destruction. And the
same tragedy is repeated in our bosom. Here, also, desire follows
desire never fulfilled, or bearing disappointment and ever new
desire in its very fulfilment. Here, also, quietude and contentment
are vainly sought for, the very nature of Will being unrest and
insatiable longing.

The beauty and grandeur of Schopenhauer s language, rivalling
the highest efforts of poetry, the force and vividness with which he
depicts the nothingness and misery of existence, the halo with which
he surrounds the sufferings of man as the truest and noblest aspira-
tions of his being, all this has vastly contributed to carrying his
name far beyond the circle of metaphysical inquirers. But is there no
escape from this sea of troubles, no compass to guide us to a haven of
rest ? Schopenhauer has pointed out such a way ; he names one, and
only one, all-healing balm for the wounds of mankind, and the name
of his panacea is self-negation. We must retrace our steps for a
moment. It has been shown that will in its lower forms is all but
void of consciousness. It blindly pursues its struggle for indivi-
dualisation, and all its latent intelligent force (barely sufiicient to
aecount for the apparent teleology in nature) is consumed in this
one aim. But the case is different in the human organism. Here
Will at last has become conscious of itself, and its own miseries are
mirrored in the intellect. By dint of this intellect Will is now
enabled to paralyse to some degree its own action ; it can intensify
this intellectual or contemplative power to such a degree as at last to
become a calm looker-on at its own deeds. By thus renouncing
itself in its highest stage of conscious development. Will may at last
find that freedom from suffering, that quiescent contentment which

(1) Eoaders ivho may be atnick with the affinity of Schopenhauer's doctrine to
certain theories of modem science (an affinity much closer than would appear from my
hurried sketch), I must remind that the Gherman philosopher’s chief work was written
before 1818. But even if this precedence could not be established, Schopenhauer’s
claim to originality would not be in any way affected. He stands altogether on a higher
IcT^ than is attaimible to physical science, whose results he uses for his metaphysical
purpose in the same measuro as those of psychology, history, oomparatiyo philology,
or any other empiric disciplme. Ho reasons where they observe, or, at best, classify.
This ought to be particularly remembered in a country where scientifio men proper are
apt to MSiime not only the name but also the fun^on of philosc^hers. Why the
lUlfol K andiing of the microscope or of the vivisectorii knife should entitle a man to
qpeak tg cgtMra on metaphysical quesUons it is not easy to perceive.

ABTHUB SCHOPENEAUIB. 791

is fo^ ever denied to its afiSrmatiTe efforts Bejaliung- nnd Yer>
neLaung des Willens ziun Leben ”). Consistently carried out, this
leads to the absolute deadening of individual desire, to be met with
only in certain phases of Buddhism and Christianity ; and Schopen-
hauer by no means hesitates in adopting the extreme consequences of
his doctrine. The highest stage at once of happiness and sanctity
he is prone to acknowledge in the monk of the order of La Trappe,
or still more in the Indian devotee who in passive contemplation
awaits the dissolution of his embodied will to enter the realm of
divine non-existence, Nirwana.

It is to this part of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that I was chiefly
referring when speaking of the influence of his time and of his own
personal feeling on the development of his system. In his dark
picture of human suffering he seems purposely to blind himself to the
intense though transitory enjoyment of success long desired and
well earned by arduous labour. A strong man conquering difiSculties
may rejoice in his power, and if his will be guided and subdued by
the higher motives of love and self-sacriflce, if in short he be a
hero in the true sense of the word, we surely are justified (on
Schopenhauer’s own grounds) in exalting his virtue above the
impassive selfishness of a besotted monk or fakir.

There is one other means, Schopenhauer continues, of temporarily
emerging from the toil and struggle of muU into the purer calm of con-
templation ; this means is art. The artist and he who genuinely
loves art contemplate the thousandfold formations of nature and life
without desire. Artistic gift, according to Schopenhauer, is the
power of divesting things from their accidental surroundings, of dis-
covering in the continual change of individual phenomena the lasting
essence of the type. Genius proper is the highest degree of this
intuitive knowl^ge, which asks no more for the how and the when
and the where, but merely for the what. This “ what ” Schopenhauer
identifies with the idea in Plato’s sense. The Platonic idea ho con-
siders to be the last stage of objectivated (I again apologise for the
barbarous formation) Will previous to its becoming phenomenon.
The idea lies beyond time, space, and causality, and is, therefore,
not observable by our senses ; but this does not preclude its meta-
physical reality, a reality quite as undeniable and almost as tangible
as the individual phenomena which are its subdivisions. Nature
herself is continually struggling for the embodiment of this ideal
type, but attains it rarely or never. How, then, can art hope to
realise this archetypal beauty of form P

** People believe by imitating nature. But how can the artist know the
works of nature that are beautiful and worthy of imitation amongst those that
are not, unless his anticipation of the beautiM preesdes experimee 9 Moreover,
has nature ever produced a perfectly beautiful human being ? It has been said

792

ISTHUB 6CH0FENHAXJBB.

that the artist must collect the beautiful single parts of various individuals, and
compose with them a beautiful whole ;—«a perverse and thoughtless opinion*
For we ask again, How is he to recognise that such forms are beautiful and
others the reverse P A posteriori, and from mere experience the recognition of
the beautiful is impossible; it must always be at least partly d priori, , , . The
fact of our appreciating human beauty on soeing it, and of the artist recognis-
ing it with such distinctness as to be able to reproduce it without ever having
seen it, and to surpass nature herself ; this fact is explained by the other fact
that we oursdvea are that Will, the adequate objectivation of which in its highest
development is thus appreciated or discovGi*ed. . . . True genius discovers
in the single phenomenon its idea. He understands the half-uttered words of
nature, and himself pronounces clearly her stammered utterance. lie impresses
the type of beauty, vainly attempted by her in thousandfold formations, on his-
hard marble, and places it before nature, saying, as it were, * See hero what it
was thy desire to express.’ ”

This is one of the two passages which the greatest artist amongst
poets, Goethe, especially admired in the work of the greatest poet
amongst philosophers. This testimonial alone ought to be sufficient
to protect Schopenhauer from the suspicion of exaggerated idealism
in art. He does not undervalue the necessity in artistic production
of experience external and internal, of realism as we should say ;
but this realism ought always to be illumined by the supernal light
of ideal intuition. Neither does he confine this requirement of a
typical background to representations of the beautiful or harmonioua
proper. Sir John Falstaff or Mrs. Gamp are realisations of Platonic
ideas, no less than the Madonna della Sedia or the Venus of Milo.
With the above remarks, I would ask the reader to compare Scho-
penhauer’s discoveries with regard to tho scsthetical basis of music
treated by me on a former occasion in these pages (see Article on E.
Wagner, Fortnightly Eeview, March 1, 1872).

And here my task draws to a close. I have endeavoured, as well
as my power and my space would permit, to point out the maii^
features of Schopenhauer’s system. Much had necessarily to be
omitted, much to be touched lightly, which for its fiill elucidation
might have required as many pages as I had words to give it. The
more attractive or popular sides of the philosopher’s thought I have
neglected on purpose, thinking it unnecessary to bribe my readers
with such intellectual small change. I shall be satisfied if thinking
men in this country, who hitherto perhaps have known little more
of Schopenhauer than his name, may be induced by my remarks te
follow up the traces of reasoniug here vaguely indicated.

F. Hubffbr.

P.S.— A few weeke after these pages were written and sent to the Editor, an English
work on Schopenhauer, by Miss Helen Zimmem (published by Messrs. Longman),
made its appearaace. I am glad to call the reader’s attention to her interesting and
acofisitaaecoiiiit of the philosopher’s life, founded on the books by Qwinner, liindner^
and InueDBtaedty and supidemented by copious extracts from his own writings.

RUSSIA AND TURKEY.

Nearly all public writers and speakers in England, and indeed in
Germany and the Austrian monarchy also, seem to take it for
granted, that the ruling and permanent motive of Russian policy is
the desire for territorial aggrandisement. Most of them further
assume that this policy, so dangerous to her neighbours, and sup-
posed to be so specially dangerous to English power in the East,
can only be resisted by supporting the Turkish Empire, as the state
most directly threatened and least able to sustain an attack. Having
been led, in the course of a journey undertaken this autumn through
Russia and the Black Sea countries, to question both these assump-
tions, I desire to examine them, and that with reference rather to
the course of Russian history generally, and to the character of the
Turkish administrative system, than to the events of these last few
weeks or months. My object is not so much to establish any posi-
tive conclusions as to show the unsoundness of the premises on
which are based many of the doctrines most frequently and con-
fidently put forward in our recent discussions on these topics ; and
this, I venture to hope, may be done without any desire or tendency
to serve party interests. Properly understood, the question of our
action in the East is altogether apart from English party politics,
and a man^s judgment of it ought to be quite unaffected by his view
of our subjects of difference at home.

Let me say at starting that I am in no sense an advocate or
even an apologist of Russia. Like most English liberals, I had
been accustomed to regard her, ever since the &tal day of Yilagos
when she crushed the independence of Hungary, as the archfoe of
political progress, the incarnation of political evil. Even now,
her further advance over the provinces of the Turkish Empire
would, as it seems to me, be a great misfortune for those pro-
vinces, for herself, for the world. But the Russia of 1876 is not
the Russia of 184:9. Just as we have come to look differently upon
Austria since her acceptance of constitutionalism after 1866, and
upon Prince Bismarck since he shook himself loose from the feudal
party in Prussia, so we must learn to recognise the changes that
hava passed in Russia since the accession of Alexander II., changes
more rapid than any other European country has undergone in an
equally short space. And in any case we ought surely to unlearn
the habit, not more unfair than it is unwise and misleading, of
putting,, as a matter of course, the worst construction upon every
word or act of Russia. I do not therefore attempt, nor desire, to
argue that the policy of the Russian Govemme'nt has been, or is now^
a disinterested policy. I do not deny, that there is a party, a strong .

794 STT8SIA. AND TU&EET.

party, which hankers after further conquests, and dreants of ^some
day reaching the Bosphorus. But what I hope to show is, firstly,
that the recent history of Russia affords far less evidence of a
passion for territorial aggrandisement than is commonly believed
here; secondly, that such aggrandisement would be distinctly
injurious to her; thirdly, that her present action is sufficiently
explainable without the hypothesis, so generally accepted in England,
that her aim is the seizure of European Turkey ; and fourthly, that
the actual condition of both Asiatic ^nd European Turkey clearly
shows that the worst possible way of checking Russia is to try to
maintain the statiia quo there, to allow the Porte to go on expecting
support from us, and to teach the subject Christian populations that
it is to the Czar, and to the Czar alone, that they have to look for
deliverance from intolerable misgovernment.

It is natural that any one who sees on the map the Muscovy of
the sixteenth century, as it was under the Czar Ivan the Terrible,
and compares it with the Russian Empire of to-day, should be
astonished at the vast and rapid territorial growth of this state, a
growth paralleled only by that of Roman and English dominion.

The alarm, however, which this comparison causes ought to dis- '
appear when it is understood how these vast territories have been
acquired. By far the larger part have not been conquered at all, but
simply colonized or occupied. Not only Siberia but the whole north-
east of European Russia and a great portion of the south-east have
come under Russian rule almost without a musket-shot, because these
regions were inhabited by savage wandering tribes who had no hold
on the soil, and made no objection to the advent of settlers. Some
of them, such as the Tchouvasses, Mordvins and Tcheremisses of the
Volga, are already half Russianized ; others, like the Samoyedes and
Kirghiz, remain pagan or Mohammedan ; but all are on perfectly
good terms with their governors, and seem, indeed, never to have
had anything to complain of. Other large districts,'*' such as the
Tatar Khanates of Kazan and of the Crimea, have, indeed, been
conquered, but conquered almost of necessity, being held by semi-
civilised Mohammedan states between whom and the Muscovite
frontier population it was found practically impossible for peace to
subsist.^ Georgia was not conquered at all, but handed over to the
Czar by its last king, who could not defend it against his Mohamme-
dan neighbours. The only acquisitions, therefore, on which the
charge of deliberate aggression can be based are those of Fin-
land and the Baltic provinces, Poland, the south-western provinces
conquered from Turkey, and the districts recently occupied in
Turkestan (omitting the trifling conquests in Transcaucasia made
from Persia). A few words may suffice for each of these.

(1) 1 pass over all tbifl the more hziefly becatzee it has been admirably set forth by
Hr. D. M. Wallace in an artude in this Review for last August.

BUSSU AND TUBEET.

796

All these territories, except Turkestan, were conquered when con-
quest was stiU the order of the day in Europe, and regarded as the
natural reward, even where it had not been the original object, of a
war. Our present sentiment, which condemns the transference of a
population to the rule of a victorious alien state, is extremely modem,
and far from universally dominant; witness the case of I^orth
Schleswig and the generd desire of the French, in and before the
summer of 1870, to annex the purely German districts on the left
bank of the Lower Bhine. In the case of Finland, Russia had this
excuse, that while it was held by a foreign power St. Petersburg,
Ipng close to the Swedish border, was at the mercy of an invading
force. Finland, moreover, has, ever since her submission, been
treated with singular consideration. She retains her laws, her two
languages, her metallic currency. Her free constitution, never
abolished, has of late years been recalled to active life ; no attempt
has been made to Russify her people or institutions ; she spends all
her own revenues and costs Russia a considerable sum besides. The
story of Poland offers a sad contrast to this generosity, and it is
mainly her cruelties there that have drawn on Russia the aversion of
Western Europe. Nothing can excuse those cruelties, worse even
than those of which we were guilty in Ireland in 1798 ; or the
French in Algeria. Several points, however, may deserve to be
noticed. One is, that in the original partition of Poland Russia
did no more than was done by Austria and Prussia. A second
is, that there existed an ancient and bitter hatred between Russians
and Poles, dating from the days when the latter, then the
stronger power, had nearly crushed the national existence of
Russia. Further, the democratic party in Russia in 1863, seeing
in the division between the peasantry of the Lithuanian provinces,
who had no Polish sympathies, and the nobles who had, an oppor-
tunity of inflicting a blow upon the nobility generally, hounded on
the Government against the insurgents. And the Government itself
was stimulated to greater harshness by its fear of the revolutionary
spirit which had made Warsaw an outpost. To stamp out the con-
spiracies which were always simmering there, seemed to them
necessary for the safety of Russia itself.

The acquisitions of Asiatic territory made in 1828 from Persia and
in 1829* from Turkey were less considerable than might have been
expected, considering the weakness of the beaten party. We need
not set this down to generosity — generosity was not a feature in the
character of Nicholas — it was due to the sense that annexations
were not really for the conqueror’s interest, who had enough on his
hands already. The war of 1828-29 was not a war of aggression, but
arose out of the conduct of Turkey towards the Greeks, and though the
Turks were reduced by the second campaign to comidete helplessness,
not on acre of land in Europe was demanded as the price of peace.

796

RUSSIA AND TURRET.

It is mainly the more recent advances of Russia in Oentr£l Asia
that have excited the attention of Europe and the suspicions of
England. Tet nothing can be more natural than these advances^
and England is the country which ought best' to understand this,
since the causes are almost exactly the same as those which drew
us on from conquest to conquest till wo became masters of India ; or
as those which have similarly drawn on the French in Algeria, and
the Americans over the land they had reserved for the Indian tribes.
A civilised state with semi-civilised states or predator}^ nomad races
on its frontiers cannot stop where it will. With the former it makes
treaties ; the treaties are broken ; it is obliged to punish, and can
often only punish, by annexing, or by assuming a protectorate which
comes to almost the same thing as annexation. With the latter no
treaty can be made, and the civilised power must therefore protect its
borders by stationing troops along them, and must chastise every
inroad by pursuing the marauders on their homeward way, perhaps
for great distances. This is found so expensive and troublesome that a
regular expedition is undertaken ; the offending tribe is defeated,
and to prevent fresh irruptions forts are erected and garrisons
stationed in its country, which thus becomes reduced to submission.
This advance involves a contact with fresh tribes, who molest the
peaceable natives or the civilised settlers by their inroads ; and the
same process is repeated, the line of outposts always moving forward,
and the line of settled subject country following it. In some such
way as this has the frontier of Russia advanced from the river Ural
to the banks of the Upper Oxus and the Thian-shan mountains.
One of the most distinguished officers in the Russian service, a man
whose veracity no one could dream of questioning, assured me that
the archives of the War Office at St. Petersburg were full of direc-
tions to the generals commanding on the Turkoman steppes, forbidding
them to engage in fresh wars or annex fresh territory ; but that the
nature of things had been too strong for the War Office, and had
carried the Cossack outposts steadily forward. Something, I think,
must also be allowed for the desire of the frontier generis to find
occupation for their troops, and to distinguish themselves by con-
quest, just as Csesar advanced against the will of the Senate, and our
Indian generals or statesmen in spite of the East India Company.
And it is no doubt also true that the extension of territory has been
regarded with a certain pleasure by the unthinking majority of the
Russian people, more pa:^cularly by the army, everywhere ^e home
of chauvinism. But one may well believe that the Gfovemment has
• not desired, much less designed, these advances, for thcy'bring nothing
but expense and responsibility. Turkestan is a poor country, quite un-
« able to pay the expense of managing it ; the Central Asian tz^e which
t opens up is of no great consequence, so thinly peopled are all these

BirSSU ANB TUBEEY.

797

countries ; and in case of a European war tlie necessity of wasting
troops in this remote comer of the empire might be seriously felt.

That Russia, finding herself at the north foot of the Hindoo Eoosh
(which she may probably reach before long), would in the event of
a war with England use her position there to annoy us by stirring
up the Afghans or hill tribes of the Punjab frontier, or even by
intriguing with the native princes of India itself, is probable enough.
But it is quite another thing to fancy, as so many people in England
do, that she is going to the Hindoo Koosh for that express purpose.
Had she wished either to menace India or to increase her Asiatic
dominions by war, there was, there still is, another course open to
her. That course, not more costly in the first instance, and far
more profitable in the long run, is to annex Persia, a country with
no army, no fleet, and hardly any government ; a country of' great
natural resources, with a splendid geographical position between the
Caspian and the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a population far less war-
like and fanatical than the Turkomans, industrious and settled, though
reduced by misgovernment to a point far below its natural level ; a
country moreover from which India could be threatened much more
effectively than from Khiva or Bokhara. Needless to say that we
could not have saved Persia, and that she could not have defended
herself: six or eight regiments would be enough to overrun the
whole kingdom.

That Russia has during the last three centuries extended her
borders farther and faster than any other European state is unde-
niable. But then she is the only European state that could so
extend itself. The settler who lives on the edge of the wilderness
may take in as much land as he pleases, while a proprietor in Kent
or Normandy cannot push his fence six inches back without risking
a lawsuit. And in her extensions to north, east, and south, where
she found cither unoccupied lands or races inferior to her own, she
has really played the part of an improving and civilising power.

Territorial extension, however, which marks a period, sometimes a
long period, in the history of almost all great states, always comes
sooner or later to an end, sometimes, as with most of the countries
of modem Europe, because there is no longer room for it, some-
times also, as in our own case and that of the United States, or as
of, Rome in the time of the early emperors, because it is believed to
be no longer for the interest of the state itself. Twenty years ago we
used to have panic-fits about the extension of the United States.
We now know that they do not desire either Canada or Mexico
or the Antilles, and have even neglected chances of getting
a footing in the two latter. Similarly, we have ourselves repeatedly
refused to found new colonies or annex new territories in the Eas^
though the world does not yet credit us with such moderation.

798

BUGN3U AND TUBSET.

Now BuBsia seems to have reached this point, when for her own
interest further territorial growth ought to stop. How far she sees
this herself, I shall inquire presently ; meantime let me endeavour
to state the grounds for believing that she would only injure herself
by attempting to incorporate the provinces of Turkey, for example,
or to wrest from us any part of India.

Bussia has already more land and vaster natural resources than
she needs or can deal with. Not to speak of the mineral riches of
Siberia, stiU only half opened up, or of the fertile countries along
the Lower Amour, or of Turkestan, or of Transcaucasia with so
many sources of wealth only requiring capital for their develop-
ment, she has in the southern part of European Bussia, between the
Dnieper and the Ural Biver, a region of unsurpassed fertility, not a
third or fourth part of which is now under cultivation, and which
could probably support a population as large again as that of the
present European dominions. In this vast tract, which one may
call the Great West ** of Bussia, colonization does indeed go on,
and now the faster since railways have been made through it ; but
it goes on with nothing like American or even Canadian speed, and
at the present rate another century will not see the country even
fairly well settled. People in Western Europe often talk of Bussia
as overflowing with men,” of her “ teeming millions,” and so
forth. The truth is that she is the most sparsely populated of
civilised states, with the possible exception of Sweden, and that her
population increases slowly. She is a child in the shoes of a giant.>^
Instead, therefore, of grasping at fresh territories which she is not
able either to occupy with settlers or develop by an expenditure of
skill and capital, it is her interest to concentrate all her energies on
her internal growth, to fill up her empty spaces, improve her com-
munications, train her people to add the higher forms of skilled
industry to those comparatively rude and raw handicrafts which,
speaking broadly, alone at present thrive among thenr. One cannot
travel through the country without seeing that this policy, already
to some extent begun, will make her more prosperous and more
powerful than any course of conquest could possibly do.

Further, Bussia is at this moment unfitted to assimilate or
administer new territories, and notably such territories as the
Turkish. So large an empire as hers is already requires a great
multitude of officials, and the supply of good officials is &r below
the demand. I do not speak merely of corruption, which every one
in Bussia asserts to be so widely spread — for of its existence a
stranger has no means of judging — but of incompetence for the
higher administrative functions. Bussia, it cannot be too often
repeated, is a new country, where civilisation has but recently taken
root. Great efforts have been made, and made with much success—
for tiie people is not only a quick but a really gifted one — ^tp, spread

RUSSIA AKB TUREHT.

799

education and rear up a cultivated class. But that class is still
small, compared with the whole population, or compared with the
same class in France, Germany, or England. And even in those
who have been to the university, culture is not the same thing as it
is in educated men in those above-named Western countries, where it
rests, so to speak, on a basis of hereditary cultivation going back for
centuries. If, then, a sufficiently qu^ified bureaucracy is now
wanting in European Russia, how much greater would the deficiency
be in the countries west and south of the Euxine, where several half-
civilised races live intermingled, differing in religion and language,
hating one another, depending entirely on their governors for the
impulse which is to pacify, elevate, discipline, and, in fine, civilise
them P Highly qualified men, morally as well as intellectually, are
needed to deal with the problems which such countries present. We
believe that we send such men to India ; but we are able to do so
because the class from which they come is, in an old and over-peopled
country like this, unusually large. In Russia such men are too few,
and they are likely to be still fewer, for at present the tendency of
educated youth there is quite away from official life, towards the
professions or towards employment under such local authorities as
are independent of the central Government.

In the dominions conquered by Russia, such as Transcaucasia,
everything depends upon the bureaucracy, everything is referred to
it, everything proceeds from it. What impulses to civilisation are to
be given must bo given by it, for there are few individual settlers,
and they do not affect the country in the least. Now with
excellent intentions and considerable efforts, the bureaucracy has so
far been able to do but little to improve or develop the later Russian
conquests. Order is not yet secure in them, and they are so far
from paying their way that they constitute a serious drain on the
imperial revenues. They will not pay till they are civilised ; and
civilisation cannot be introduced by ukase. With all this work
on her hands it would be folly for Russia to attempt the larger and
more difficult task of assimilating Bulgaria, RoumeUa, and Anatolia.

There are other reasons in the internal conditions of Russia proper
why she should refrain from entangling herself with new difficulties.
The emancipation of the serfs has raised as many problems as it
seemed to solve, and no one can yet say how it may end. Serious
reforms in the Church are talked of and likely to be before long
undertaken. The finances of the empire, exhausted by the con-
struction of so many railways, which have not yet begun to be
remunerative, require the most careful nursing. Moreover (and
this is a reason to which the enlightened liberals of Russia attach
great weight) the addition of new territories obviously incapable
of constitutional government would impede or delay that creation of
free representative institutions which is the great and the most.

800 .

RUSSIA AND T UR KEY ,

diffieiilt, question of tlie future for Eussia^ and towards whioli some
' cautious steps, liaye already been taken. The power of the central
Goyemntent is now felt to be too great, and eyery extension of the
districts which can only be ruled despotically by the central
Gtoyermnent will necessarily throw more upon it.^

It may be answered : Supposing all that has just been urged to
be true, it does not follow that the Eussian Goyemment or people
see it to be true. They may not belieye in this alleged incapacity
to find administrators, or they may think that the same course of
aggrandisement which has brought them to their present point of
greatness will carry them on with full sails oyer the difficulties of
the future : fu ne cede maliSy aed contra audentior ito. Or, eyen while
admitting that the deyelopment of their internal resources and the
creation of representatiye institutions is the surest path to, pro-
sperity, they may be too much seduced by the brilliant prize that
seems to lie within their grasp, too much intoxicated by a sense of
their “ historic Panslayonic mission,” to be able to halt when the
yoices of race and religion call them on.

This is a matter on which no one, no, not a Eussian himself, can
speak with confidence. The sentiment of a nation, the policy of a
Goyemment, change from day to day, and change from causes
beyond prediction. Two or three remarks howeyer maybe yentured
for the sake of clearing away a preyalent misconception.

It is commonly fancied, not only in England but in the Austro-
Hungarian monarchy (where jealousy of Eussia is eyen hotter than
among ourselyes), that what is called Panslayism is the peryading
passion of the Eussian people and the guiding star of Eussian
foreign policy. No greater mistake. Panslayism is a theory, a
doctrine, a sentiment, what you will, which has been taken up by a
certain party in Eussia, composed chiefiy of such of the nobility as
liye in Moscow, of officers in the army,, of a certain number of
journalists and students. It has absolutely no Tiold on the
peasantry, who would not eyen know what it meant, and yery little
on the merchants. It is repudiated by the adyanced or socialistic

(1) Of come all that ii said here as to the present unfitness of IRussia to annes: the
provinces of Turkey applies with tenfold force to India, as being far more distant and
having far fewer dements of national affinity to start from. That Russia may some day
wish to menace us through her proximity to India is possible enough. But that dm
will attempt, within any time one can presently foresee, to conquer India for herself,
wi& all that die has on her hands already, and with the possibility of conquering
Persia alumys open to her, is an opinion whidi would soaroely seem to require refuta- '
tion. As to title interest of England in keeping Russia out of Constantinople, two
grounds are' commonly assigned. Some say that once there she could conquer Aula.
Hinei* aqd frrgetting that die can do so now from ^banscaucasia. Others say
thstsha nu^ blo^ our path to India through the Levant. No doubt, if we lose tho
oomm l£e sea ; but if we lose ^t we diall probably anyhow lose India too. It
vibjiw'bBitBinly be a misfortune for the world (inclnding Russia herself) if she seised
Qonsfcsa t iaople. But the Injury to England in paxticiilar would have nothing to do
withXndia': it'wuiddo^Biirt in the stoppage of our trade with the Iffiack Sea oountrids
and Korihem Persia.

EUSSIA AND TTJMBT.

801

democrats. It is in fact tlie doctrine of a parlyi not of the nation,
of a party like that which in England would have' us go to war for
the Turks, or like that which in France desires to restore by arms
the temporal power of the Pope.^ That it exerts considerable in-
fluence is undeniable, but that .influence is rather declining than
increasing, and at this moment draws what appears to be its strength
from a source that is really quite different — ^the religious sentiment of
hatred to Islam. The wisest heads in Bussia, and particularly
those who surround the present emperor and reflect his moderation,
see through the vague and flimsy notion, a wild inference drawn
by ignorance and vanity from misconceived premises, that the
largest Slavonic state is necessarily or naturally called upon to imite
all Slavonic races under one sceptre. And though they may occa-
sionally ][use this spectre to frighten their neighbours, they have far
too sound an appreciation of what is practical in politics to be
influenced by it themselves.

Similarly with regard to the supposed desire of all Bussians to
possess Constantinople. One may hear some irresponsible talk on
the subject from private people : expressions of a belief that sooner
or later the Czar will plant the cross on St. Sophia, and that all
South-eastern Europe will own the Muscovite faith and rule, while
England and Austria gnash their teeth in the distance. Just such
irresponsible talk one may hear from Germans about the necessity of
annexing Holland, or even of gathering England and Scandinavia
into the great Pan-Teutonic Empire. Just such idle hopes one may
hear Spaniards express of the incorporation of Portugal. Just such
was formerly the vapouring language of Americans about Canada
and Mexico. A boy* when he looks at a map fancies that the most
powerful countries arc those which cover the largest space, and it
is wonderful how many of us remain boys in this regard. There
are plenty of foolish persons in Bussia as elsewhere, who fall into
this vulgar confusion of bigness with greatness. But there, as else-
where, sensible men see not only that Bussia at Constantinople
would be weaker and more exposed than she is now, but that she
would run some risk of ceasing to be Bussia at all, and would be led
away into new paths whose end no one could see, and where the
true interest of the old Bussion people would soon be lost sight of.

The active sympathy shown by the Bussian nation with the.
Herzegovinians and Servians during the last few months has been
taken in some quarters as conclusive evidence of its passion for con-
quest. No assumption can be more gratuitous. It would have been
strange indeed if a people among whom religion is an infinitely more
potent force (the oidy one that moves all classes) than in any other

(1) Two asiiimptionB are constaatly made by our KnsBojdiobistB, wbicb are^ perhaps
less absurd as applied to Bussia tbaa they would be to a popular goTemmeiit, but sfiU
quite baseleBs : firstly, that Bussia is one, instead of being divided into parties like om>
selves ; secondly, that die has one deq»-laid unchanging scheme of policy, to which die
adheres through all changes of circumstance. *

‘802

BUfiSIA AND TUBSEY.

part of Europe, Had not sympathized with its co-religionists in their
struggle, not against ordinary enemies, but against the very enemies
before whom Buseaa had lain prostrate for two centuries, and with
whom she had maintained a long, doubtful, though ultimately sue-
cess&l, warfare for thrlee centuries more. . The hatred of the Bussian
people to Mohammedans is almost as striking a feature in their
national history and character as it was in those of the Spaniards of
the sixteenth century, among whom its origin had been precisely
the same. It is almost as deep a feeling as their devotion to the
Orthodox Church j it is, in fact, with them a part alike of their
religion and their patriotism. No one can understand the attitude
of Busaia in these questions without allowing for the intensity in
her people of this combined sentiment — ^the result of her whole
history— of sympathy with Christians of the orthodox rite and faith,
and hatred to their Mussjlman rulers. In the present instance
there was added to these feelings a wrath and horror at the cruelties
perpetrated by the Turks, which were not indeed more deep or
genuine than the indignation those cruelties called forth in England,
but were all the fiercer because it was commonly believed in Bussia,
down to the middle of September last, that Europe generally, and
England in particular, were viewing those cruelties with complete
%mg froidi and that they had not in the least affected the traditional
English friendship for Turkey. These things being so, one has no
need either of Panslavistic theories or the lust for conquest to ex-
plain that passionate outburst of feeling in Ilussia this summer
which the Czar and his advisers have found it so hard to resist. It
pervaded, it still pervades, all classes, even down to the peasantry ‘
who know and care nothing about politics. It would make it far
easier for the Government, despite its financial embarrassments, to
undertake a war against Turkey now than at any time within this
century. People have compared it to our sympathy with the Gari-
baldians in 1859, or to that of the Germans for the Holsteiners in
1863. But it is, by the nature of the case, infinitely stronger than in
either of those instances (in which, nevertheless, plenty of volunteers
were found ready to start), and may best be likened to the feeling
wherewith the English people heard in 1641 of the terrible massacre
of the Protestant colonists of Ulster, a feeling which bore no small
part in bringing on the great Civil War.

It is no part of my purpose to discuss the recent policy of
Bussia. Whether it has been selfish and tortuous, or whether
the Government has honestly endeavoured to restrain the fana-
tkism of its subjects and co-operate with the other Powers for the
benefit of the Christians in Turkey, is a matter of present political
^eontraversy, and I desire here to keep as much as possible upon
blstorioal ground But however its rulers may use the enthu-
siasm d the ibuBsian people, the fact of that enthusiasm and

BUSSIA. Ain) TUBKET.

8oa*

its grounds ought to be known and weighed, for they are most im-
^rtant elements in the problem before us.

Without professing to see farther into a millstone than the rest of
the world, one may incline to believe that whatever be the dreams
or schemes of the party of advance in Bussia, and whatever the
possibility that the Cabinet of St. Petersburg may ultimately, more
or less, adopt them, its present policy is directed, not so much to the
acquisition of territory as to the extension and strengthening of its
influence in Turkey, both upon the Porte itself and upon the subject
Christian populations, so as to establish, in fact, a sort of protectorate
over the Sultan and his dominions. Such a protectorate might be
sought either from selfish or disinterested motives ; doubtless it is
sought from both. But be this as it may, be Bussia’s object the
extension of her dominions or only the extension of her influence,
the question how she may best be met — checked, if you will — is not,
substantially, very diflerent. On this question a few words may be
said in conclusion.

The influence of Bussia over the Christians of Turkey and her
power for aggression, so far as it depends on that influence, is held
to be derived from two sources. One is, their belief that she, and,
she alone, sympathizes with their sufferings, and is prepared to help
them. This is a real and potent cause. The other is their sense of
nearness to her in blood and religion, the feeling of Slavs for Slavs,
of Orthodox Eastern Christians for one another. This cause has
some force ; but a force both much more limited in area and weaker
within that area than is usually ascribed to it. Let us see how both
may be met.

It is, or ought to be, superfluous to add a particle of fresh
evidence to that which is already before Europe of the misgovem-
ment of the Turkish provinces and of the utter incapacity of the
Government for reform. Every Frank you meet in Anatolia or
Boumelia or Constantinople itself, however much he may prefer (as
he usually does) the individual Turk to the individual Greek or
Armenian, tells you that things are certainly no better than they
were twenty years ago, in the days of the Crimean war, that they
are probably worse, that it is useless to expect any reform from the
Porte, that all the piomises it makes will and must be broken —
must, because there are neither men fit to carry out reforms, nor is there
any force at headqualUl^ to compel them to do so. It is really hardly
necessary, in order to get any idea of what Turkish government is,
to do more than sail down the Bosphorus and count the magnificent
palaces, rich with marble without and sumptuous decorations within,
that line its shore, palaces erected by Sultan Abdul Aziz out of
the money he borrowed in the West while his pwn revenue was

VOL. XX. N.S. 3 H

804

BTJSSIA ABB TUBEEY.

diminidiingi the oppression of the provinces increasing, the most
necessary public undertakings lying unfinished. But wherever one
goes in the Turkish Empire one hears the same story of the inhabit*
ants oppressed by exactions, of wanton cruelties perpetrated by the
officials and the tax-farmers, of land dropping out of cultivation
because the people cannot pay the taxes, of the decUne of trade, of
the decrease of wealth even among the richer families, of mines
unworked, because the functionaries from whom the concession must
be obtamed break faith or demand extravagant bribes. In a dis-
organized and dying empire it usually happens that a provincial
governor or satrap makes himself independent and establishes a
government stronger if not better than the one he has revolted from.
The Porte guards against this danger by changing its local governors
very frequently ; and what is the result P A good governor — ^for
there are good governors even in Turkey — ^is taken away just when
he has begun to know something of his district, and all the sooner if
it is suspected that he is popular there. A bad one — and considering
the nature of the Court infiuences by which they are appointed, it is
not surprising that most of them should be heartily bad — ^makes
the most of his short tenure by squeezing every piastre he can out
of his wretched subjects, whether by way of taxes or bribes or of
plain downright extortion. And in both sets of cases all continuity
and regularity of administration, all possibility of carrying out
reforms, is destroyed by these frequent changes.^

From the unspeakable misery which this misrule causes, the
Mohammedan population suffers, not indeed so much as the
Christian, because the former have more chance of protection from
the courts of law, may carry arms, and are less liable to bo robbed or
bastinadoed by a brother Muslim, but still quite enough to entitle
them to our earnest sympathy. It is surely a mistake in dealing
with this question, to endeavour to set creed against creed, and enlist

(1) It is unnecessary to discuss whether this incapacity for reform is due to religion,
or to race, or to both ; but a protest may be mado, in passing, against the notion that
the Turks deserve to be driven out of Europe because they are Asiatics, as if the
Magyars, for instance, wore not Asiatics in almost the same sense as the Turks. For
the matter of that, the Mohammedan population of the Turkirii Empire are not,
ethnologically speaking, Turks at all, any more than we ore Normans or the modem
Spaniards Visigoths. There are places in Asia Minor where you may see a few .true
T^ks stiU rcunaining, just as in -^e valleys of the Asturias you may occasionally find
villages where blue eyes and light hair show the permanence of a Gothic type. But the
Mnriims of Turkey are probably one of the most mixed races in the world, the children
of those subjects of the Byzantine Empire who embraced Islam at first, or have been
subsequently converted to it ; of slaves brought into the empire ; of janizaries ; of the
upper olass of Turks by Georgian, Circassian, Mingrelian, Gredc, Slavonic mothers.
And the cootnit is great indeed between the heavy, languid, flabby fiuses of theTurkiah
mrsl fiauily, for instance, with their drooping eyeUds and rounded sensual outlines, and
tKe fim, hard, angular, bony features, small, fierce, restless eyes, and well-knit frames
of the genuine Turks or Tatm of the Aral or Cai[q»ian steppes.

BT76SIA AND TUBEEY.

805

European feeling on behalf of the Christians only. It is also a
mistake to make the indictment against the Porte appear to rest on
isolated acts of cruelty and revenge^ however hideous. * It rests upon
a long course of misgovemment, persevered in after repeated wam-
ings^ which has reduced some of the richest countries in the world
to beggary^ which makes the lives of their inhabitants wretched,
which produces the state of society wherein massacres like that of
May last become possible.

Notwithstanding these facts, which might be supposed to have by
this time become pretty well known in the West, people talk about
the integrity of the Turkish Empire, the importance of maintaining
the statm quoy &c., &c. Now, you cannot maintain the statm quo.
As a great German writer has somewhere said, there is in the moral
and political, as in the material world, no such thing as a status quo.
All is change and motion, if not from worse to better, then from
better to worse. You may keep Turkey unscathed by foreign
invasion. You may aid the Sultan to suppress revolts within.
Sut you will not thereby, no, nor by exacting a hundred promises of
reform, arrest that sure and steady though silent process of decay
which has been going on for the last century or more, and
makes the Government more and more powerless for everything but
evil. You cannot prevent the empire from one day falling to
pieces, after another era of silent oppression varied by revolts and
massacres. You may make that era longer, but it will end at last,
and when it ends, the hatred of Muslim and Christian, more bitter
now than twenty years ago, will probably have become more bitter-
still.

It is their impatience of this tyranny and their belief that whiles
the other Powers — England and Austria especially — desire simply ta
maintain the status quOy Pussia alone is willing and able to hdp
them, that has accustomed the Christians of Turkey to look to
Pussia, and has given her the influence she now enjoys. Nothing
can bo more natural, nor do we need either secret societies or Pussian
emissaries (though for aught I know Pussian emissaries may be at
work, like moles, on every Bulgarian farm) to account for so simple
a phenomenon. These poor people are surely not to be cut off from
all hope : and what conceivable loyalty or duty can they owe to a
ruling caste and Government which calls them and treats them like
dogs P Which of us, under such a Government, would not intrigue,
and rebel too whenever he got the chance? The only way to
remove this disposition to turn to Pussia is to remove its cause,
that is, to improve the internal condition of the Turkish Empire.
As regards the largest part of that empire, where the government of
the Sultan must be suffered to subsist, because there is nothing to
put in its place, the only really effective measure would be to appoint
European commissioners, not only to watch and stimulate the ministry

3h 2 *

806

BUSSIA Am TUBXET.

at Oonstantinoplei but to reside at alltbe principal seats of proTincial*
gOYemment and see that the pashas and kadis do their duty. But
there are districts where it is fortunately possible to go somewhat
further, outlying tracts where the Christians are in a large majority,
and which may therefore be practically withdrawn from Turkish
administration, even if left nominally subject to the Saltan, as
Boumania was and Servia is. Thus Thessdy and Crete might go
to Greece, not because Greece has deserved them — what have practical
politics to do with deserts P — ^but because it will be better for all
parties : Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina would acquire a species
of qualified independence, under the guarantee of the great Powers,
and be no longer ruled and pillaged by Turkish officials and tax-
farmers. It is in these last-named provinces that the anti-Turkish
and pro-Bussian feeling is strongest; for in them the Christian
population is largest, and lying nearer to Bussia they are naturally
more inclined to look to her as a deliverer. If she devours Turkey,
they will be the first mouthful ; if she attacks Turkey, their sym-
pathy will be a considerable aid to her. Our Bussophobists ought
therefore to think it more specially important to do something to
relieve the wrongs of these provinces, ^though those who hold that
we have also a duty in the matter will not rest content without
trying to assuage the misery of the inhabitants, Muslim as well as
Christian, of Boumelia and Asia Minor.^

The other source of Bussian influence over the Christians of
Turkey lies, or is supposed to lie, in Panslavism. Now, whatever
Panslavism may be in Bussia itself, outside of Bussia it is a mere
phantom, a spectre evoked to terrify Magyars and Germans, but
which vanishes when you approach it. Over whom is it supposed
to have power? Not over the Boumans, who are no Slavs, who
are excessively afraid of being absorbed by Bussia, and have shown
not a spark of sympathy all these last months for their Bulgarian
and Servian neighbours. Not over the Slavic suQects of Austria,
who are nearly all Boman Catholics, and therefore far more repelled
from Bussia by religion than they can be attracted to her by the

(1) It is often said that the Forte will not consent to any sweeping changes or
limitations of its power. The truth is that the Forte, like other Oriental Gk>Tonunents,
will consent to anything if it is pressed hard enough, hut to nothing while it thinks it
can delay the evil day by professions and promises, and above aU, while it has stiU got
a friend loft, ourselves, whose jealousy and suspicion may be pla;^d upon. If it saw
that England was foremost (as the Crimean war gives her a right to he foremost) in
ezactinj; strict terms, its tone would soon change. There is no patriotism anywhere in
Turkey, least of all in the official class. Among them there is only self-interest, and
with self-inteiest one can always reckon. There is indeed plenty of fanatioum, i^ve
among the priests, dormant, but liable to be roused in a moment, among the lower olass.

' -But tiia c^dals eould eanly, if they wished, carry out aU the chants the Powers may
'*diB8Euai^ without exciting this frnatioism. Of course they now use it as a weapon, and
a teRiUe weapon it 1s^ against any demands of the Powers. ^

BUaSU AKD TITBEET.

m

fantastic sentiment of race. The Poles, of course, and the Oaeohs
hardly less than their PoUsh brethren, heartily hate Russia ; the
other Austrian Slavs sometimes use her to frighten the Magyar^ but
they know well enough that they are far better as they are tKan
they would be under Muscovite rule, and that with the aid of the
Germans and their own numerical preponderance they can hold their
own against the Magyars. It is by no means solely or even chiefly
due to the prohibition of the Government that hardly a volunteer
has gone from among the Slavs of Austria to help the Servians.
Coming to Turkey itself, the Greeks and Armenians have of course
no Slavonic sympathies; the Greeks, indeed, have quite difPerent
visions of their own — ^visions of a Greek Empire upon the Bosphorus.
As to the Christian Slavs, Servians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians,
Montenegrins, Bulgarians (including for the sake of the argument
the Bulgarians among the Slavs), the Panslavistic propaganda has
made no progress among the mass of them : its doctrines are known
only to some few journalists and politicians. They are, however
(except the Bosnian Catholics), drawn to Russia by ecclesiastical
sympathy. They are proud of her as a big elder brother. They
are grateful to her for what encouragement she has given them.
They would rather be under her rule than the Sultan’s, but they
have otherwise no desire to be absorbed by her. We have just
marked how soon ill-feeling sprang up between the Servians and
their too powerful friends. The Bulgarians would be very sorry to
see their lately won ecclesiastical independence sacrificed, as it
certainly would be, to the Russian desire for ecclesiastical uniformity
and centralization. Once delivered from Turkish oppression, the
Bulgarians and Bosnians would have no more desire to come under
the Russian conscription, the Russian customs system, the vexatious
Russian police supervision, than the Servians or Roumans have now.
Any kind of independence would seem preferable — ^why be swal-
lowed up and forgotten in that monstrous state, like snow-flakes in a
river ? Panslavism would soon have no more power over the Slavs
of the Danube than Pan-Teutonism has over Swedes or Dutchmen.

Whichever way the question is regarded, the conclusion appears
to be the same, thet the best way of stopping Russia is to remove as
far as possible the grounds which justify her interference, and sub-
stitute the Powers collectively, and England not least conspicuoudy
among them, for Russia alone as the protecting influence to which
the subject populations have to look. One part of this is to exact
from the Porte all such reforms in the administration of its provinces
generally as it is possible for the watchful presence of European
commissioners to see carried out. The other is to erect in the «
north of European Turkey a group of semi-independent principalities
whose interest it will be to maintain and strengthen their separate
national life, and which will, in &ot, constitute a barrier against the

808

BUSSU ABB TUBKET.

farther advance of Russia, in that direction. Of course there will be
plenty of intrigue and corruption in such principalities, as there is
in Boumania now (whose people, by the way, are in every respect
inferior to the Bulgarians), and very likely Russia will have a finger
in such intrigues. But two facts will remain : the condition of the
inhabitants will be better than it is under the Porte, and instead of
looking to Russia to send her troops in among them, they will have
every motive to keep her at arm’s-length.

This is putting the case from the most anti-Russian point of view,
and assuming her motives to be merely selfish — ^an assumption that
seems to me thoroughly wanton and unfair. True it is that some of
the bolder spirits in the Russian party of aggression would regret
the loss of a fulcrum by which they worked on the subjects of
the Porte, and by which they could also stimulate at times the
enthusiasm of their more ignorant fellow-countrymen, thereby win-
ning for their cause a strength not its own. This weapon, this pas-
sionate sympathy for Christians oppressed by Muslims, which makes
Russia at the present moment really formidable, they would lose, to
the world’s gain. But many of the best and wisest people in Russia
(including, one may well hope and believe, the emperor himself)
would be heartily glad to see substantial reforms carried out in
Turkey and the frontier provinces liberated, both for the sake of the
subject Christians, and because they feel that a large part of their
own people would thereby be led to turn their aspirations into a
healthier channel and think more of developing intellectually and
materially the Russia they have got, than of adding to her new
provinces which could only be a source of weakness.

Whatever be Russia’s real designs — ^as to which I will only repeat
that I have not sought to prove that they are unselfish, but only
that we shall certainly err by assuming them to be dishonest, and by
ignoring the mighty popular forces that are at work pressing the
Czar onward — one thing seems tolerably clear. TFhe mistake of
England has been in leaving to Russia all these years, and more
especially since the insurrection broke out in Herzegovina, the sole
championship (whether real or apparent) of good government and
the welfare of the Christian population in Turkey. What the con-
sequences of that mistake have been during the last six months;
how it has divided us at home in a way that would have been
impossible had the whole truth been known ; how it has made our
policy waver in the eyes of foreign nations ; has kept Austria afraid
to rdy on us ; has incensed all Russia, and emboldened her war
party ; has encouraged the Porte to refuse what it would other-
wise have conceded, and made it bdieve that in the last resort it can
.always play upon our fears for Constantin(^e~these are questions
which it is b^ond the scope of the present article to discuss.

James Bbygs.

A MEDIiEVAL SPANISH WRITER.

How is it that the early history and literature of Spain, a country
so rich in both, are stiU such unfamiliar subjects in England,
even to those readers who have a considerable knowledge of
historical text-books, and a general acquaintance with the main
literary features of the Middle Ages P Of late, since the study
of our own early English work and of Chaucer has become a pro-
minent and important one, the literary material remaining to us
from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in France and Italy
has been eagerly ransacked for means of illustration and comparison,
and we have learnt to read Chaucer, not only in the light of his
sources, but of his contemporaries generally. Little or nothing,
however, has yet been brought forward with a like object from the
side of Spain — Spain with a vernacular literature dating at least
from the middle of the twelfth century. The sixty-six years
between 1284 and 1350, between, that is to say, the death of
Alfonso the Wise and the accession of Peter the Cruel, saw in
Italy the production of the Bivina Cmnmedia^ and the rise of
Petrarch and Boccaccio ; in England the births of Chaucer and of
Langland ; in France the completion of the Roman de la RobOj the
composition of the Roman de Renart^ and the appearance of a
troupe of fashionable song- writers such as Machault and Granson,
the masters of Chaucer’s youth, or Deschamps his panegyrist. Is
thero really nothing in Spain at the same time which is woriih
recovery, worth putting by the side of any or all of these national
dlevelopments, for illustrative and comparative purposes?

As a matter of fact, there is a great deal. The period of
Spanish literary history which answers best indeed to the period of
Chaucer and his school in England, or to that of Petrarch and
Boccaccio in Italy, is not these sixty years, but the reign of Alfonso
X. Under Alfonso’s hands the infant literature of Castile, whose
first rude up-growths are to be sought in the Poema del Cid, in the
monkish legends of Berceo, and in various anonymous poems of
uncertain ^te, sprang into sudden life and luxuriance. Nearly a
kundred years before a similar edict was issued by Edward
HL’s government, Alfonso ordered all public instruments to be
dncwn up in the vernacular, and himself threw aside Latin for
Spanish in all the works, historical, literary, and scientific, which
he either undertook or set on foot. As the l^g of a mediaeval state,
Alfonso’s upon the respect of posterity are by no means

810

A HEDLfiYAL SPAinSH WSIXEB.

greats but as tbe patron and guiding spirit of a small circle of
literary men, most of them Orientals, he is one of the most
remarkable figures of the Middle Ages, and the literature of Oastile
received from him the same initial stimulating impulse, as did the
literatures' of England and Italy, in very different ways, from
Chaucer and Dante. When he died the first great literary outburst
of Spain was over. We have nothing like the brilliancy or the
comprehensiveness of Alfonso’s circle again till we come to the
fifteenth century and the reign of John II. At first sight, the time
which immediately followed his death appears one of exceptional
gloom and disturbance. The consequences of Alfonso’s political
blunders are evident at every turn, while the influence of what was
real and beneficent in him — the impulse given by him to thought,
to literature, to civilisation — is hard to trace amid the darkness of
incessant civil war. As we read the accounts in the chronicles of
the long minorities of Ferdinand IV. and Alfonso XI., we are apt
to think on the one hand that the general development of the nation,
its advance in common with the rest of Europe, was practically at a
standstill for fifty years, and on the other hand that the work and
genius of Alfonso had left few direct traces behind them. But if we-
look closer we shall discover signs of steady literary development, of
a steady increase in literary material, and a steady improvement in
literary forms and methods throughout the whole period; and at
the same time in the advance of education, in the prevalence of
Oriental ideas and modes of composition, in the growing value for
culture which can be perceived even among the turbulent nobility,
whose fathers deposed Alfonso X.* — ^the lasting inheritance which
Spam had received from the hands of her learned king, becomea
more evident year by year. In various books of the time now
extant, notably in the poems of the Archpriest of Hita,^ thia
advance of the fourteenth century upon the thirteenth, this natural
■ growth from the childishness of Berceo towards tfie fuU stature of
the fifteenth and sii^teenth centuries, is very strongly marked. The
Archpriest’s poems are racy of the soil, Spanish, individual ; they
are the best parallel that Spain can make to the Canterbury Tales ;
they are full of the religious temper of the fourteenth century, and
ridicule the same abuses which roused Wyclif or pointed the moral
of the Pardoner’s Prologue. More than this, they have some-
thing of the dawning love of beauty for beauty’s sake which brought
about the eternal spring landscape and May morning in French
poetry and in Chaucer, and which has given us the exquisite

(1) Hie title of archpriest seems to answer tolerably closriy to that of rural 4eexx in
'Our own time and country. It is fully explained in Ducange, under ArchiprtAifi^r^
Hita was a place of some importance, and, besides an archpriest, boasted an alcalde
mayor, with civil jurisdiction over two or three of the neighbouring viUages.

A MEDIiBVAL SPAmSH T7B1IER.

811

^description of the God of Love in the Romance of the Bose. The
book belongs to the general literary history of Europe in the
fourteenth century, and is a valuable contribution to our knowledge
of it.

In the Ohronicle of Alfonso XI., drawn up in the reign of Henry
n., the successful rival of Pedro the Gruel, there is a passage describ-
ing the general condition of the country at the close of Alfonso’s
minority, which reminds one somewhat of the famous description in
our own English Chronicle of the state of things under Stephen.

At that time,” says the Chronicle, referring to the year 1322,
there were diverse opinions and diverse customs in the land, inso-
much that the king’s towns, and many other places in the kingdom,
Buffered great harm and were destroyed. For all the nobles and the
knights lived by robbery and plunder, and the regents ^ allowed it in
order to win their support. Also the men of the towns were in each
place divided into bands, both in those towns which had taken
tutores^ and those which had not. And in those towns which had
tutoreSf those who were most powerful oppressed the others so greatly
that these others were obliged to cast about how they should free
themselves from the tutor they then had, and find another who should
undo and destroy their adversaries ; while in the towns which had
mi tutores^ those who had the upper hand took the king’s taxes for
themselves, and maintained with them great retinues, oppressing
those who were poorer, and laying upon them extortionate taxes,
until at last in some towns some kinds of labourers arose like one*
man against those who oppressed them, and slew many of them and ^
took and destroyed all their goods. In no part of the kingdom was
there any law or justice, and the country arrived at such a state
that none dare travel upon the roads unless they were armed and
many in one company, so that they could defend themselves against
robbers. And the greater part of the nobles maintained themselves
by robbing and plundering the neighbouring territories; so also did
many of the towns, and those who belonged to the labourers as much
as thoso of noble birth. And such was the evil in the land that
though men were found dead on the highways none wondered at it.
Nor did any wonder at the thefts and robberies and evils which
were done in the towns and upon the roads. And, moreover, the
regents imposed extortionate taxes and services on the land every
year, so that the towns of the kingdom and the estates of the knights
and nobles became more and more depopulated. And when the
king came of age, and freed himself from his tutors, he found the
kingdom much depopulated and many places in ruins, for in these
ways many persons of the kingdom had destroyed their inheritances '
(1) The regents, that is to Biy, of Alfonso's minority.

812

k SCEBURYAL SPANISH WJEtlTEB.

and the places in which they Uved, and had gone to people the king*
dome ,of ^agon and Portugal/*

It was during this time of anarchy and distress that the two men
of 'whom we have been speaking came to maturity. Juan Buiz,
Archpriest of Hita^ and the Infante Juan Manuel, were bom and
died almost in the same years. Juan Manuel was born in 1282, two
years before the death of Alfonso X., and died probably, though
not certainly, towards the end of 1349. The Archpriest was
^^already old,** in 1343, and after the year 1350, in which the last
mention of him occurs, we find another archpriest installed at Hita,
the new name appearing in a bull of the Archbishop of Toledo*s,
dated 1351. So that if we suppose the Archpriest to have been bom
in the last years of Alfonso X., the two lives would be almost exactly
contemporary, and would cover the whole period from Alfonso’s
death to Pedro’s accession.

Of Juan Euiz’s life we know next to nothing. That he was
probably bom at Alcala de Henares, a town near Madrid, after-
wards the seat of Ximenez’ famous University, that he became
Archpriest of Hita,^ and that between the years 1337 and 1350
he was imprisoned in Toledo by the well-known Cardinal- Arch-
bishop Gil de Albomoz, for some unexplained offence against eccle-
siastical morals — ^these few facts, together with the approximate
dates of his birth and death, are all that can be gathered from the
learned introductory notice which Sanchez, his eighteenth-century
editor, prefixed to the first edition of his poems, or from the elaborate
chapter which Los Bios, the latest historian of Spanish literature,
has devoted to him.

One precious scrap of biographical matter, indeed, remains to us
which has been hitherto overlooked. It is the description of his own
personal appearance, which in one of the last groups of poems in his
book he puts into the mouth of his chief character TJrraca — ^just as
fifty yews later Chaucer drew an undying picture of himself in the
well-known words of the Host, or in the speech of the eagle in the
House of Fame.

*‘Senora,” said the old woman, see him often. He has a large body
and stout limbs ; the head not small, thick haired, set dose upon the
shoulders ; the neck not very long, hair black, ears large ; the eyebrows far
apart and black as coal. He holds himself as straight as a peacock. His
gait is quiet and his speech pleasant. His nose is long — ^which somewhat
spoils him — ^his gums scarlet and his voice deep. The mouth not small, lips
mudi as usual, moie thick than thin, and red as coral. His eyes are lit^
and a trifle crooked. He is nimble, valiant, youthful ; he play on instru-
xnents, and all the jonyhur'a arts are known to him. A dieeri^ giver to all
of my trade— -in fhet such a man as is not to be met with on every common.’*

iji) Hita is the aaoisat and lies on the side of a hill doping down to the

valley of the Henares, on the high road from Madrid to Bayonne.

A MEDIiEVAL SPANISH WBCCEfi.

813

From tlie hand of this lively^ black-haired, thickset a volume
of poems has come down to us, treating widely different subjects in
various metres, but stamped throughout with qualities of vigour,
coarseness, brightness, akin to the bodily qualities described by
IJrraca. The book, as we have it, contains a string of poems bound
together by a slight autobiographical thread, the adoption of which,
generally speaking, gives life and point to what would otherwise be
more confasion| though every now and then it loads the author into
inconvenient artistic difficulties. The love-adventures are represented
as undertaken by the Archpriest himself ; he recounts his own expe-
riences in the Serranas, or Mountain Songs, and it is thejloss of a
personal friend which leads him to the composition of a long sermon
on Death towards the end of the book. So that while Chaucer chooses
a journey for the framework of his stories, his Spanish predecessor
makes his own life the framework of his. The employment of such
a literary form at all marks, by its greater modernness and self-
consciousness, a considerable advance upon any earlier Spanidi work.

The book begins with an invocation to the Deity for aid in its
composition.

Thou, my Lord God, who creatcdst man, inform and aid me, thy
Archpriest, that I may make a book' of virtuous love, love which
delights the body and quickens the soul.’’

Then turning to his audience he warns them against mistaking
the nature of his work.

** Do not think that the book is a fool’s book, or that anything
you read in it is a mere jest. For as good money may lie in a vile
pocket, so wisdom may be hidden in an untoward book. The grain
of fennel-seed without is blacker than a caldron, but within is very
white, whiter than ermine. White flour lies under a black covering.
Sugar, both white and brown, comes from the vile sugar-cane. Above
the thorn is the noble rose-flower, and under mean characters (fea
lefra) may be the wisdom of a great doctor.”

The reader, therefore, must not judge by appearances. '^And
since the Virgin is the beginning and root of all good, I, Juan Bois,
will begin by singing her Seven Joys.” Two songs, canticaa, on the
Seven Joys of^he Virgin follow in flowing popular verse. The joys
and sorrows of the Virgin were among the most popular mediscval
subjects, and we have several poems in English like these of Juan
Buiz dating from about the same time. They are abruptly succeeded
by a grotesque story in support of the advice given in the prologue,
which may perhaps claim the honour of having, through some inter-
mediate channel, suggested to Babelais an idea of which he makes
large use in his Pantagruel. The discussion by signs between
the English wiseacre, Thaumastus, and Panurge, ** disciple de son *
maistre. Monsieur Pantagruel,” is either borrowed indu^tly frmn

814

A MEBIiByAL SPANISH WBITEB.

Juan Ruiz, or traces back to some older common source. This
common sourcei if it exists, has not yet been pointed out. Mean-
while, the story is to be found in the Archpriest told with greater
point and breyity, and infinitely greater refinement, than by
Rabelais.

There is not much that is worth dwelling upon in the various
love-advmitures, the accounts of which fill up the first quarter of the
book. One of them leads the Archpriest to a digression on astrology,
which is ingenious enough as an attempt to reconcile superstition
and orthodox beliefs, and which, moreover, contains the story of
Ring Alcaras and his son, interesting as an example of contem-
porary Arabic fiction. It belongs- to the same class of Andalusian
stories as the story of Ring Alhaquim of Cordova, in Juan Manuel’s
Conde Xiucanor — ^a younger brood of Eastern fancies which must
not be confounded with the great collections, such as the Galila and
Dimna, or the Book of Sendebar, which the Arabs and the
Persians had alike inherited from India, their primeval home. The
pretty fanciful story in the Oondc Lucanor of the exacting
Queen of Cordova, who worried her husband to death with requests
for snow in summer, and mud to dabble in, like the children she saw
in the street, is another example of the same kind.

Of all the Archpriest’s courtships not one is successful. In one
of them he tries to soften the heart of his lady-love by sending her
poems, trwm and cantares, in great profusion. ^^But, alas I I might
as well have sown the barren shore of Enares with barley I And
true it is, as the old books say, that he who soweth in the sand
shall never come to the threshing.” Discouragement at last takes
possession of him, and he goes sadly home to his house, railing at
love and fate. In the night, as he lay brooding over his unlucky
star, a man, tall, beautiful, and gentle, came unto me. I asked of
him, * Who art thou P ’ And he answered, * I am thy neighbour.
Love* ” The pelea^ or argument, with Love which Tbllows is ex-
tremely spirited, and the metre is flowing and musical, so that the
few prose extracts I am able to give but poorly represent the
original. Eight of its nineteen sections are taken up with illustra-
tions of the seven deadly sins, which, according to the Archpriest,
Love carries about with him. Juan Ruiz’s treatment of this common-
place of mediaeval thought compares favourably with the Parson’s
Tale, and is, on the whole, among the best of conventional render-
ings. Thirty years later the weU-wom, much-abused subject was to
receive new dramatic force and meaning at the hands of Langland,
and the way was opened for the mystical figures of Dunbar or for
fi^^enser’s marvellous procession. n

*^e Archpriest’s invective against Love, amidst a great deal of
dnlness and rqietition, is full of touches of real feeling, sometimes

A HEDLSYAL SPANISH WBITEB.

ai5

even of real poetry. There is in it, too, a real though intermittent
striving after literary form, a glimmering ^nse of proportion, of what
is efiective. It is this awakening sense of fbrm, this dawning
power of self-restraint for a literary end, which is the special mark
of distinction between the fourteenth and the thirteenth centuries.

Here are one or two passages from it

•* Tbou art the father of fire and the parent of flame, and he who serves thee
best, is flrst consumed. 0 Love ! he who followeth thee, thou consumest him
body and soul as the Are bumeth up the branches. They who know thee not
were bom surely under happy stars, for they lie down in peace, and nothing
mokos them sad.

*•••••*

** Thou art a cunning thief by day and by night. When a man is most
secure, then thou stealest from him his heart. And when thou hast stolen it,
thou gWest it to another, to one who loves it not, and tprmentest it with all
thy pains. So the heart without the body passeth into thy fetters, and sigheth
and dreameth of things beyond it. In one moment &ou makest it pass
through thrice a hundred days. AU the world may go by while thou boldest
it prisoner, and by-and-by thou leavest it alone and sad, filled with many a
dread. . . .

<< Miserable one ! What wilt thou do at the day of judgment, when of all
thy possessions and thy great rental God will demand the account? Then
neither thy treasuro nor thy fifty kingdoms shall avail thee anything ! **

The note of this last passage is the note of a transformation which
was going on all over Europe at the time it was written, in propor-
tion as each nation awoke to a sense and knowledge of antiquity.
The changes which the divine forms of Greece underwent in the
Middle Ages have been often dwelt on, both poetically and his-
torically. There is, indeed, an endless suggestiveness in the contrast
between the reserve and the simplicity of Gfreek art or of Greek
speech at their best, and the chatter and colour with which the poets
of the Middle Ages loved to surround the Greek myths. The fresh
untutored fancy of the modem nations, and the barbaric passion fbr
colour and ornament which marks aU young civilisations, work
strange havoc with the subtler older forms. Ares and Aphrodite
are reclothed to suit their new masters, and in the place of ^^Eros
unconquerable in battle, Eros who descends upon the rich, who
sleeps in the tender cheeks of a maiden, who wanders over the sea
and over the fields, and whom nor god nor mortal may escape,^’ we
have the “Venus* son, Daun Cupido,”

« All in flowres and flowreties
Painted all with amorettes
And with losynges and scochouns
With bryddes, lybardes and lyouns
And other beastis wrought fdU well,”

who brightens the pages of the Bomance of the Bose, or, “his gilt«
heere crouned with a sun,*’ comes hand in hand with Aloestis to

816

A HEBIiBYAL SPAJTISH WBIEER.

r^roach the poet of Oreseide and Emily. Sometimes, indeed, the
new handling is much less tender and sympathetic than this. The
younger world with its new beliefs has a serious return upon itself^
and flouts the old in lines like these : —

t

** Lo, hero of paynims cursed oldo rites
Lo, Here what all hir goddes may ayaile
Lo, here this wretched worldes appetites
Lo, here the fyn and guerdon for trayaile
Of Joye, Apollo, Mars and swiche rascaille.*’

Or Lore, once a tricksy boy nestling in Dido’s arms, becomes, as in
this rough Spanish work we are considering, the Patron of the Seven
Deadly Sins, reproached for a profane use of Church services, for
want of charity towards the poor, and finally threatened with the
penalties of the Christian Last Judgment !

The satire on the Properties of Money is chiefly interesting as an
indorsement from the side of Spain of the common verdict of
fourteenth-century poetry on the ecclesiastical abuses of the time.

“ If only you have money, you will have consolation, pleasure, merriment
and the Pope’s favour. You will be able to buy paradise and to win salvation.
Por where there is much coin, there is much benediction. In the Homan court,
where is the seat of holiness, I saw how all men did homage to money. Great
honour did they give it with great solemnity. All bowed down to it as to
the king’s majesty. It made many priors, bishops and abbots, archbishops,
patriarchs and powers; it gave dignities to many ignorant clerks, it made
falsehoods of truths and tru^s of falsehoods. It made many clergy and many
religious, monks and nims, and other consecrated ones. Money declared those
who could pay to have been well examined, while the poor were told they had
not learning enough for such offices.”

To all the Archpriest’s long and tedious reproaches. Love seems
to haVe listened with remarkable patience, till at last, when his
accuser is wearied out, he begins a reply, which is largely taken
from Ovid, and quite uninteresting except for the following little
description of the ideal woman, which may be put side by side with
other pictures of the same time.

** Seek a woman lovely, gracious and gay. She must not be too tall, nor
yet dwarfed. If possible, do not foil in love with a country woman ; for she
knows nothing of love, and is but a simpleton. Seek a woman of fair diape
and small head; let her hair be yellow, and not dusky like the privet-juice;
let her eyebrows be fax apart, long and arched, — ^her eyes large, beautiftil,
painted and shining. The ears smi^ and delicate, and ti^e heed to it, if die
have a long neck, for such are greatly admired.”

And having foxmd this paragon, —

** 6eiye her never tiring; for by service love grows. And devotion in the
good never dies nor is idle.”

' **Love departs leaving the Archpriest once more reconciled to his
away and wholly determined to follow his advice in all things. The

A HEBLSYAL SPANISH WBITEB.

817

novelette of Doiia Endrina and Don Melon de la Huerta which
follows is intended to illustrate the Archpriest’s search for the
beautiful ideal described by Love. The story of it is mainly taken
from the De Vetula of Pamphilus Maurilianus, a short Latin play
or interlude written before 1200, and popular among Uterary men
up to the sixteenth century. A French translation of it by
an unknown author was presented to Charles YIII. just before
his Italian expedition, and was afterwards printed at Paris in 1494.^
The Latin original also found its way into print at the end of the
fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century. The Archpriest’s
poem is a very free version of the De Vetula. He has changed the
classical names and colourless personages of the original into Spanish
men and women of his own day, and localised the story in a Spanish
town.

He himself is supposed to represent the hero, while the heroine
is a certain charming Doiia Endrina, a rich child-widow from the
town of Calatayud, near Saragossa, who comes to visit Alcala. The
mtula or messenger between them is called Urraca, and becomes,
henceforward, the most important character in' this odd poetical
miscellany. The description of this clever, unscrupulous old woman,
nominally a pedlar, really the agent and friend of all the pining
lovers in the neighbourhood, is full of liveliness and force from the
moment when she first appears to the time when, after having be-
friended the Archpriest in many an adventure, she dies and leaves
him to bewail her in a mock-heroic epitaph. The Latin original is
throughout modernised, recast, and to a great extent purified.

The first interview between the Archpriest and Endrina has many
graceful and spirited touches. This is how he describes his lady-
love’s approach : —

**Ab! Dios! hoW beautiful comes Doiia Endrina through the market-
place! What a figure! what grace! what a proud heron’s neck! What
hair ! what a tiny mouth ! what colour ! what charm I Her eyes, whenever
she lifts them, idioot forth arrows of lovo.”

The great hoyrever, with its bare, unshaded space, and its

wicked open doors,” is a dangerous spot for love-making. To
speak with a lady in the plaza is a very public thing.” The
Archpriest therefore employs his most persuasive arts to entice
Endrina into the shade of a gateway where they may talk in
private.

** Stq> by stop Dona Endrina under the gateway came. Very gay and proud
was she, very soft and pleasant. Sitting down upon the bench, she bent her
eyes upon the ground, and 1 began my speech anew.”

The Archpriest’s wooing does not seem very attractive to the
modem reader. A great deal of it is literally translated from
(1) Gkiujel, Biblioth. Franc. toI. x.

818

A MEDICAL SPANISH WRITEE.

PatnpliiluBi and we miss in it the bright incisiYe touches which give
life to most of his imitations; Endrina treats him at first with utter
disdain. She is rich and he is a nobody, so that the wooing is
naturally a difficult one. However, he obtains at last a promise of
another meeting, but only in the presence of a third person. The
Archpriest goes home disconsolate, foreseeing that he will not be able
single-handed to make much of his courtship, and taking counsel
with himself as to whose aid he shall ask.

I will have neither brother nor nephew to help me. The fire of
love changes all hearts, so that none keep faith with any other.
Friendship, gratitude, and kindred — ^woman rules them all I

So he seeks and finds an old pedlar woman, “ one of those who
sell trinkets in the streets. . . . They go from house to house selling
all kinds of gifts. None pay any heed to them. They are left
with the ladies of the house, and it is they who blow the windmills
round!”

The character of Urraca is a very common one in Spanish litera-
ture.^ And though in this case it is, of course, directly imitated
from the Vetula of Famphilus, it was probably well known to the
Archpriest from actual life. The clash of two opposing systems, of
the chivalrous worship of women, which before the Archpriest's
time had found supreme expression in the poetry of Provence, with
the stricter and more jealous conventions which Spain' had imbibed
from her long contact with Oriental manners, was sure to produce
such a personage as Urraca both in real life and in literature.
From the Archpriest's time onwards, the Trota-conventoSf or go-
between, remained a stock character in Spanish fiction, and in the
later dramatic literature of the sixteenth century Urraca has
numerous sisters.

A bargain having been concluded, Urraca goes merrily through
the town, ^‘jingling her bells, and crying her jewels, rings, and
pins.” Endrina sees her and calls her in. ^

There is considerable play of character and motive in the con-
versation between them, and the glimpses it affords into local
manners are oftefi amusing. The young widow lives shut up with
female relations, and Urraca is quick to remind her that in a house
fiill of women only there is never any lack of quarrels and dis-
comforts. At the same time she is besieged with suitors who
canvass and intrigue with her guardians incessantly, and keep her
in perpetual torment. On all sides are men eager not for her but
for her riches. Whereupon Urraca cleverly suggests how much
better it would be if she had a protector. Don Melon would draw
you out ,of these troubles, these suits, affironts, insults and bar-
jgftmings. All the world says that these good-for-nothings will rob
(1) Bee Tioknior, Spaa. lii toL L p. 72, xioto.

A HEDLSYAL SPANISH WETTEB.

819

you till they wouH even leave you the keys in your doors. Whereas "
he would defend you in all these quarrels^ for he is learned both in
law and in books.”

cannot marry before my year of mourning is out/’ says
Endrina, else I should lose the legacy which was left to me by my
husband.” XTrraca combats this objection in vain. Endrina
gathers sudden strength and sends her about her business. Back
hies his messenger to the Archpriest and plunges him into the depths
of grief with her untoward news. The Archpriest’s lamentation has
the true Proven9al ring.

** Ay de mi / what ill news is this you have brought me P Ah I tormented
heart ! senseless thing ! Why wilt thou slay the body in which thou hast thy
dwelling ? Why wilt thou love a mistress that cares nothing for thee ? O
heart ! for this thy fault thou shalt Hto a life of pain ! 0 eyes ! my eyes !

Why did you ever light upon a mistress who will not look upon you?
Eyes, by your seeing, you have undone yourselves ; for this, 0 my eyes ! you
shall suffer and die ! 0 tongue, unlucky ! why didst thou talk with a mistress
who will not listen to thee nor hear thee ! O body ! so tormented ! how is
death come upon thee ! ”

Touched by his desperate case TJrraca at last says to him, Be
comforted, my friend. Your joy is near at hand. Doiia Endrina is
yours, and will do my bidding. If you love her much she loves you
more.” And this is how, in the most charming passage in the book,
TJrraca describes the love-signs she has noticed in Endrina.

** Sometimes 1 grow tired, and am silent. Then she bids me speak again
and not leave off. I make as if I hod forgotten the whole matter, then she
begins it herself. . . . Bound my nock she casts both her arms, and thus for a
long time we stand together, talking always of you, of nothing else do we
speak, unless when some one comes by. Her lips all the time tremble a little,
and her colour changes from red to yellow. Her little heart beats many a
time while she presses my fingers gently with her hands. Each time that I
mention your name, she looks to me and sighs, and stands thinking; then
her eye quickens and she flutters all over, as if she already saw you approach-
ing. Many other things tell me the same tale. She does not deny it, indeed
she says ^t she loves you. If I do but stand by you, the branch will
bend at last, and if TJrraca calls Endrina will come.”

A description, it must be remembered, written thirty or forty years
before any of Chaucer’s best work.

After much talk and many fables TJrraca persuades Endrina to
come and visit her in her cottage, out of reach of the severe eyes of
mother and guardians. Endrina is to be regaled with games and
fhiits. Nothing is said of the lover in the invitation. But the
lover is of course not far off, and hastens to plead his own cause.

** On the day after St. lago, at the hour of middle day, when people are
lunching, came Doiia Endrina with my wise old woman, and enter^ her
house wi^ her very quietly. As my goc^ old TJrraca had warned ifle before-
hand, I not much behind, and hs^ soon found my way thither. I found

VOL. XX. N.S. 3'1

820

A HEDUIYAL SPANISH WBHEB.

the gate ehut, but h, vitja soon caught sight of me. * Huy ! ’ she said, * who
is that maiking such a noise without F Is it a man or is it the wind ? I think
it must be a man. Yes ; I am right. It is he. Nay, it is not he; it is like
him, I confess. By my faith, it i« Don Melon ! 1 Imow him. I scent him !
That is his face and his calf s eye. Look! look ! how he watches us. Now he
tracks us like a dog I He will go mad down there presently, when he finds he
can’t undo the bolts. But he w^ break the gates ! He treats them as though
he were threshing wheat. There is no doubt about it — ^he wants to come in.
But why don’t I speak to him ?

« * Don Melon, take yourself away — the devil brought you here ! Don’t
break my gates. The abbot of St. Paul’s gave them to me. You put never a
nail into them. I will open the door to you. Be patient ; don’t break it down.
Tell me gently and quietly what you wish, and then go from my gates without
delay. Enter and be welcome, and let me know what it is you want.’

“ Senora — Doila Endrina ! You, my beloved ! Vieja I was it for this you
shut the door against mo ? Ah happy day, in which I find so sweet a prisoner I
God and my good fortune have led mo hither.”

And then, with a royal defiance of possibilities and confusion of
identities, the poem winds up with the statement of the marriage
of the lovers, and of tho merriment at their wedding feast. The
confusion between the Archpriest and Don Melon has, indeed,
throughout a careless, clumsy effect. The very next poem in the
collection contains the account of fresh love adventures undertaken
by the Archpriest and Urraca. Endrina is forgotten, and the Arch-
priest takes care to inform us that he told the story, not because it
happened to himself, but to lay bare tho wiles of TJrraca and her
class, for the warning of the young and inexperienced. Besides
this, the want of incident and proportion in the story makes it, as a
whole, ineffective ; but the liveliness of the style, the grace of some
passages and the humour of others, beguile the reader through a
piece of work which, after all, is made perpetually, though, perhaps,
artificially, interesting by its date. It is like a shorter, slighter
rendering of the opening scenes of Troilus and Creseide, with
TJrraca for Fandarus, and Alcala for Troy. Between the Arch-
priest’s easy verse and the second half of that matchless story, there
can, indeed, be no sort of parallel or connection. The unvilling
treachery of Creseide and the de^air of Troilus belong to another
artistic world altogether.

After the episode of Doiia Endrina the poet resumes the thread
of his own supposed biography, and we find ourselves in the midst of
some parodies of the ITorth French paBtourelleB^ or rustic Itongs. Tho
Trouv^e literature was evidently well known to the Archpriest, as
it was later to Chaucer : he quotes the French YnopeU and translates
two or three ^^fahliaux. From one of them, indeed,^ he took
the hint of the longest poem in his book, the Battle of Carnival and
Lent. He . must have known something too of the Arthurian
'mmances to . judge from his mention of Tristan and Iseult; and
' ;(1) Albirwndi worked up ia the Bonumds Benard.

A WBaNJEVAL SPAmSH *WBITEB.

821

tiiese Serranas of Ids are evidenlily modelled on Bach FastourdUies of the
Trouv^es as the modem reader may find printed in the collections
of Roquefort, de la Boide, and elsewhere. It is euiious, on the
other hand, that the traces of Proyen9al influence in his work in
spite of the reyival of the Gay Saber which was attempted at Toulouse
during the Archpriest’s own lifetime, and of the dose connection
between several of the latest troubadours and the court of Alfonso X.
— are extremely slight and, for the most part, doubtful. The fact
points, perhaps, to the troubled state of Castile at the time the Arch-
priest was writing, and to the absence of any court circle with
leisure and culture enough to keep the Froyen9al tradition aHye. It
was not till the reign of John II. and the rise of that circle of
court poets whose productions fill the Gancionero de Baena that the
poetry of Provence obtained anything Uke a general influence over
the poetry of Castile. But while these Serranas of Juan Buiz are,
as fiir as their general form goes, imitated from the French, they are
intensely Spanish in everything else, full of local colour, and bristling
with proverbs and country terms, some of which are even unknown to
the Academy Dictionary, as well as overlooked by Sanchez in his most
insufficient glossary. The prevailing tone of them is satirical, and the
common ancient and mediscval view of mountains as places devised for
the terror and inconvenience of man — a view which the Archpriest'
shares indeed with Evelyn and Dr. Johnson — ^is amusingly evident
in them. The Apostle,” says the poet, tells us to try all things.
I went to try the mountains, like a fool. I soon lost my mule, and
could get nothing to eat. He who looks for anything more than
rye-bread there is a man of no understanding.” According to his
experience it snows and hails perpetually in the sierras ; the cold
there is intolerable, and he is again and again driven by stress of
weather to seek shelter and food at the hands of the strange serranas
or shepherdesses he describes. These uncouth counterparts of the
French bergires are, for the most part, fierce and manlike in bearing,
and they are capable of carrying a traveller up-hill on their
shoulders, or of Imocking him down at one blow should he offend
them. Their huts are only open to the traveller who is both rich and
liberal, and prepared to pay a heavy price for their hospitality in
scarlet girdles and plaited caps, in Aggers and shoe-bucUes, in fur
cloaks and tambourines, and all other things in which a robust
Spaniifii girl delights. As a picture of rustic manners at the time
these strwge poems are invaluable, and to a Spaniard who knows
the country between Alcala and Segovia, the local touches in them
must have the same interest as the mention of places in the Canter-
bury Tales has for English readers. The valleys of Lozoya, of Bio
Frio, of La Tablada, bear the same names as they bore in the
Archpriest’s time. The road to Segovia still passes up the Lozoya

8i 2

832

A liEDIiBVAL SPAmSH WBITEB.

valley, and fhe streams whicli water the Ghiadarrama are still famous
for the trout, which, with cheese, cream, butter, and partridges,
made up the fare of the mountain folk in Juan Ruiz’s time.

The third cantica^ written in the common eight-syllable redondilla
metre, describes a flirtation between the Archpriest and a serrana,
with the feminine passion for dress strongly developed.

Under the house at Cornejo, on the first day of the wedc, I fell in with
a serrana, half-way down the valley, clothed in fine scarlet with a woollen
girdle.

** Said I, * God save you, sister ! *

** Said she, * What seek yon in those ports, and why are you out of the road P’

** Said I, * 1 am come on a visit to the mountains, where 1 would fain find me
a wife.*

** Said she, * He never errs who marries here. Seek and you will soon find.
But, my fnend, look you, know you anything of the mountains P ’

** Said I, * I can keep cows with any man ; 1 can ride a mare bareback. I
know the wolf, and how he can be killed ; when I sally forth behind him, I
catch bitn up faster than the wolf-dog. 1 know how to drive cows, and how
to tame the fierce young buUock. 1 can churn and make cream, and fashion
the leathern wine-bottles. I know how to make sandals. I can play upon the
pipe. I can ride a three-year-old colt. And I know how to play with swords.
I can jump to any tune. There is neither high nor low — ^in my own opinion
»who can get the better of me. And when 1 stoop to fight, one quarrel is
enough, and he who offends me falls.’

** Said she, * Hero you shall have just such a marriage as you seek. For I
myself will gladly wed with you, if only you will give freely. Let us come to
an understanding.*

** Said I, * Ask what you will and 1 will give it you.’

** Said she, * Then give me a band for my hair of scarlet wool. Give me a
fine tambourine with its six rings of tin ; give me a sheep-skin pelisse for
holydays, and a cloak for the rest of the year. And tell no lies about it.
Give me earrings and a buckle of shining brass. Give me a yellow cap striped
up the front, shoes up to the knee, and all tho world will say, **Menga
Lloriente maziies well.” ’

'*Said I, *A11 these things will I give you and more still, if you desire
more, of things gay and pretty. Settle it with your parents, and then we will
hold our weddLng-feast. Do not forget. 1 go to fetch what you ask.’ ”

And so the faithless wooer departs, leaving Menga Lloriente to
wait for many a long day for the yellow cap and the shining buckles.
The fourth cantica contains a similar dialogue, except that the Arch-
priest represents himself not as wooing, but as already married, and
the serrana is shrewder and more business-like than Menga Lloriente.
Its short two-accent lines defied all attempts to reproduce them in
a prose dress. I have, therefore, tried to keq) the swing of the
original without, however, attempting to represent the rhymes. The
abuzidant monotonous rhymes of very early or purely popular works
like these canticw seldom or never pass into an EngUsh dress
satisfimtorily.

'* Near the vale of Tablada,

The mountain ways past,

I fell in with

At the dawning of day ^

A lICEDIJSYAIi SPANISH WRITER.

823

*• Far above» up the valley,

X thouglit then to die
Of the snow and the cold
And the heavy night dews
And the terrible frost.

** Coming down, as 1 ran
A serrana 1 found ;

Fair was she and merry.

Fresh coloured of hue.

** Said 1 then unto her,

* 1 salute thee, O fair one ! *

Sai d she, * O swift runner.

Why here dost thou linger ?

Q-o past on thy journey.*

Said I, * But I freeze !

And for this come 1 hither
To theo, O divine one :

For pity's sake hear me
And shelter bestow.*

Said the maiden, replying,

* Ah fnend ! in my cottage.

He who rests himself there
Must wed with Aldara

And pay with large payment.*

Said I, * *T would delight me.

But alas ! I a wife have
Hown there in Ferreros,

But of money in plenty
I will give theo, beloved.*

** Said she, * Como then with me,*
And carried me with her.

Then a bright fire she kindled
As their custom is — ^there
In the snowy Sierra.

** And rye-bread she brought me.
Brown coloured, — and wine.

Bad wine, sharp and thin.

And meat that was salted.

** Gave me cheese of her goats* milk
And said, * Seiior, pray light
This brazier and take
Just a taste of this meal
1 keep here laid by me.*

•* Said kindly, ‘ Guest, feed thee
And drink and refresh thee.

And warm and delight thee.

No harm shall come nigh thee •
While here thou abidest.

824

Jl HEDLEY/LL SPANISH WBITEB.

« < For he who hxingB presentB,
Such gifte as 1 ask for
Shall earn him his supper
And bed meet to rest in
Without more of payment.

,* * ♦ •

* So give me a girdle
Of scarlet well dyed,

A dainty camisa
Arranged to my liking
With its collarette ;

« < And give me a necklaco
Of tin beads in plenty.

And give me fine jewels
Of Yidue and wor^,

With a light fiirry cloak.

* A head-dress come bring me
Gaily striped, and a jacket.
Shoes must there be also
High pitched in the instep
Of cloth well embroidered.”

« < Serrana, Senora,

Such goods and so many
Are not with me to-day ;

But my promise 1*11 give
For when I come again.*

** Said the witch then, replying,

* Nay, where is no money
Is no bargain made.

No pleasant times follow.

No smiling is there.

“ ‘ Never merchant of worth
Journeys forth without money ;

And I take no pleasure
In him who gives nothing.

Nor will I give him rest.

<< * Board and lodging are never
With compliments paid.

While for money w^ men
Do whatever you please—

A thing all the world knows.* **

These cantieas are not only the earliest specimens of pastoral
poetry in Castile, but, with one doubtful exertion, they are also
the earliest dated examples of lyrical Castilian yerse. The ballad or
historical romance is of course a good deal older, and must be dated
at least as iar back as the Cronica General of Alfonso X., where,
scarcely concealed by their prose dress, verses from the oldest
romances may be found in considerable numbers. But the Cantieas
de Benana of Juan Buiz, together with the other religious cantieas

A WSDUEVAL SPANISH WBITEB.

' 835

among his poems, are, mth the single exception of a curious piece of
verse in the poems of Berceo, a thirtecnth-centuiy monk, the oldest
examples with a date that have come down to us of Spanish volks-
Ikder^ of those short poems of love and humour which have always
been, and are still, to judge from the stories of Feman Caballeros,
the most common and the most congenial expression of the Spanieh
mind. If any one wishes to see to what perfection the special form of
lyrical verse we have been considering, the Berranilla, or mountain-
song, was afterwards brought in Spain, let him turn to the exquisite
serranilla by the famous Marquis of Santillana, beginning, Moza
tan formosa;” which is both quoted and translated in Sismondi’s
'^Literature du Midi.” Putting the fourth cantica of Juan Ruiz
side by side with it, one sees what strides the language had made in
the hundred years or so which separates the two poems. The later
serranilla flows and sparkles from end to end like a mountain brook.
All Juan Ruiz’s uncouthness is gone, but the raciness, the rough
truth to nature, the satiric touch, are gone too, and the peasant
herdswoman of the earlier poem has turned fairly into the dainty
Arcadian shepherdess of the Renaissance.

Released at last from the avaricious hands of the serranas, the
Archpriest betakes himself to a shrine near the mountains in which
he had been wandering, the chapel of Santa Maria del Yado, " a
place held in honour, holy and devout,” and there offers to the
Virgin three religious poems, a hymn in her honour, and two short
accounts of the Passion. These three hymns, interposed as they
are between the Canticas de Serrana and the Battle of Carnivid
and Lent which follows, seem to our modem taste oddly out of
place. It is evident, however, from the head-link at the beginning
of them (to borrow an expression from the Chaucer Society) that
they were intended by the author to occupy their present position.
Throughout, indeed, the book is arranged on the bone and antidote
principle. The Archpriest’s plan seems to have been to go as far as
he dare in the description of the vices and allurements of the world,
trusting to the after-effects of a sermon or a hymn, introduced
without any regard to congruity, to vindicate his own intentions and
the rights of morality. Hence the position of these hymns between
the eoarse satire of some of the Serranas and the burlesque of
Carnival and Lent. The same device is resorted to at the end of
the book, where a long discourse on Death and various religious
poems are provided as a counterpoise to the audacity of the last
scenes of the Carnival episode.

The Battle of Carnival and Lent is the longest poem in the
volume. The general idea of it is taken from a French fabliau
(published in Le Grand d’Aussy’s collection), and dating probably
from the thirteenth century, which describes how> at the celebration

826

A HEDIiEYAL SPANISH WEITEB.

of the Feast of Pentecost, the two great lords, Ghamage and Earesme,
appeared at the court of St. Louis, how they declared war against
each other, and how, after a combat, in which Earesme was sup-
ported by all the different yarieties of fish, and Ghamage by all
kinds of meats armed with cooking utensils, Ghamage and Noel com-
bined conquered Earesme, and obliged him to swear, as a condition
of peace, that he would only appear in public for forty days running
in the year, and for two days in each week. The French poem belongs
to a class of allegorical compositions, of which there are numerous
other examples in the langue d!oil; such as ‘‘La Bataille des Yins,’’
‘‘ La Bataille d’Enfer et Paradis/* ‘‘ Le Tournament d* Antichrist,**
&c. As a rule they are among the dullest of the fabliaux, and La
Bataille de Ghamage et Earesme ** is no exception. As far as treat-
ment is concerned, Juan Buiz has to a great extent escaped the dul-
ness of his original. His lively sarcastic touches make his poem at
least readable, and, as usual, he has entirely changed the atmosphere
and background of the story. Ghamage becomes a Spanish hidalgo,
of a bloodthirsty, swaggering, gluttonous type, probably well known
to the Archpriest from actual experience ; while Earesme turns into
Dona Quaresma, the courageous queen of the sea and its tribes, and
the despotic regent of the country during Garnival’s imprisonment.
In the character of Quaresma it is not impossible that we have a
reflection of the great queen-mother, Dona Maria do Molina,^ wife
of Sancho IV., the chief regent of Gastile during the minorities of
her son Ferdinand lY. and her grandson Alfonso XI. If this is so,
there may be a good deal of political meaning in other parts of the
poem, though to attempt to trace it here would lead us too far
afield. The character of Noel, which plays an important part in
the French fabliau, is left out by the Archpriest, and the story
gains artistically by the introduction of Love, as the friend and ally
of Gamival, and by the elaborate description of their triumphal
procession, which winds up the poem.

Still, in spite of a possible political meaning, and of improved treat-
ment, the story of Gamival and Lent remains from its very nature the
poorest piece of work in the collection. From its first half, which de-
scribes the battle between the two armies of fish and flesh, and the cap-
tivity of Gamival, there is nothing which will bear quoting in externa.
To modem taste it seems a childish sense of humour that is pleased by
the mere grotesqueness of the notion of a fight between a cuttle-fish
and a peacock, an oyster and a rabbit, a hare and a cray-fish. The
obvious older fancies and the easy amusement of the past are no
longer possible to us, and the modem reader finds nothing but taste-
lessness and unrediiy where a fourteenth-century audience found

(1) Maria de Molina died at Yalladolid in 1322, wom ont by the anxietioa of her long
■ad Btormy life. She is one of the noblest figures of the fburteenth oentury.

a' MEDIiESVAL SPANISH WBITBE.

827

oddity and fun. Still the catalogue of birds and beasts is managed
with a good deal of skilly as may bo understood by any one who will
compare it with a similar catalogue in the French fabliau or with
the list of wines in the Sataille des Yins.V The cray-fisbfrom the
river Enares whose claws stretch as far, as the Guadalquiver, Don
Salmon the hidalgo awaiting the onslaught of Carnival with the
dignity becoming his rank, the hardy pike, the dog-fish with his
tough and homy skin ; and on the other side the ** mild and aged ox/’
who is of no further use as a beast of draught or burden, and there-
fore comes sadly to join the great food army of Carnival, the swag-
gering mountain goat with his formidable horns and teeth, the
kidlings and sucking pigs, capering and shouting, and the little
fried cheeses riding on wine-bottles who are the pages or esquires of
the host : — all these defile before us with as much of lifelikeness as
the nature of the case allows. Just a little more satiric purpose, or
an underlying allegory a little less obvious and conventional, would
have lifted the whole on to another level.

However, after the battle, when the personages are reduced in
number, the poem improves greatly. There is a good deal of brisk
untutored imagination in the passage which describes Carnival’s ride
through the country after his escape from custody. His flight is of
course ominous of the end of Lent and of Lenten diet, and of the
approach of unlimited revelling and good cheer. The alternato
enthusiasm and terror of the flock, as they behold their lord and
master, arc well caught in lines like these : —

** Said the lambs when they saw him, ' Hero is the end ! ’ Goats and kids,
rams and sheep gave great leaps, and said one to another, * If Carnival leads us
hence through the highways he will strip the skins off many of us ! ’ The
fields of Medellin, of Ca9eres, of Troxillo, the plain of Plasengia as far as
Yaldemorillo, and all the Serona country, the swift youth sped quickly by,
making groat expedition. The country of Alcudia and all Calatrava, the lands
of Easalvaro and of Yalsabin, — he journeyed over them all in three days. It
seemed as though he flew ! And the Eabbi’s horse boro him well, for fear.
As soon as the bulls saw him they tossed up their horns, the oxen and the
cows set their bells a-ringing, the ^ves and the yearlings gave great shouts,
* Hither, hither, yo herdsmen ! Como to us with the dogs ! ’ ”

The news of Carnival’s escape and the letters of defiance which
reach her shortly from his mountain camp, drive Quaresma to
despair. She sees that the game is over and that flight is all that
is left to her. Moreover a weak woman is not meant for fighting,”
says the Archpriest, with a possible reference to things political. So
she bethinks herself of a vow she had formerly made to go on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem and prepares with all haste to carry it out.

Was it in some such guise as this that the Wife of Bath journeyed
to Compostella P

** On the Friday of Indulgences (Good Friday), Quaresma donned a long

828

A MEDIJEYAL SPAOTSH WEITEB.

pilgrim’s robe, a huge round sombrero adorned with shells, a pilgrim’s staff
carved with images and palm-branches, a basket and beads to speed her
praying, and shoes rounded and well soled. Bound her waist she bore a great
bag, and within it a store of crusts and white church-rolls,^ for with such
things pilgrims are always well provided. Slung beneath the arm riie carried
her gayest ornament, a wine gourd redder than a jay’s beak. It held a quart
well, or perhaps a trifle more. You will never meet a pilgrim without this.”

Thus apparelled, Quaresma stole away by night to Boucesvalles.
Her gaunt figure fairly out of sight, the land lies open to Carnival
and Love, the two emperors whose coming upon the earth is
heralded by ‘*a great rumour.” It is on Easter Eve that Carnival
e^ppears; and to meet him the butchers go forth in crowds, the
Babbis, the tripesellers, the shepherds from the hills with pipe and
tripping citola. A scarlet banner goes before him, and upon it a
figure — a lamb it seemed to me,” says the Archpriest with audacious
irreverence ; sheep and goats, cows and bulls, and chestnut-coloured
oxen, ‘^more than there are Moors in Granada,” crowd around it;
and in the midst rides Carnival in a chariot covered with skins and
hung with horns. His axe and knife arc in his hands, and around
him are his dogs, greyhounds, mastiffs, sheepdogs, and “night-
prowlers cunning in search of meat.” The herdsmen receive him
gladly, and encamping in their shambles ho holds his court ; “ in
his pride he began to make knights and to practise knightly graces.
Slaying and slaughtering and flaying the cattle, he gave to all who
came, Castilians and Englishmen — Castellanos e Inghscs** *

On the day following Carnival’s entry Love in his turn takes the
world by storm.

“ It was the holy day of Easter. The sun had arisen clear and splendid.
Birds and men and every beauteous flower go forth with singing to welcome
Love. The birds salute him — jays and nightingales, larks and popinjays great
and small, break forth into sweet and pleasant singing — and ^e best among
them are the merriest. The trees receive him with branches and with flowers
of diverse kinds and of diverse colours. Men and women greet him joyfully,
and the timbrels sound forth amid a multitude of instruments.” ^

The catalogue of musical instruments which follows would, I
venture to think, puzzle even a musical antiquary, and to reproduce
it in English would require a dissertation on every alternate name.
Some of the descriptions are very happy, as for instance that of the
votUf Chaucer’s rote, the note of which soars higher than the pre-
(1) Chaucer's ** Pan de mayn.”

(ly 1 suspect that IngUsea here is introduced merely for the sake of the rhyme. It
dioidd he remembered, however, that throughout the Archpriest's century — ^in &ct, from
the knighthood of Edward 1. at Burgos and his marriage with Alfonso X.’b half-sirter to
the maniage of John of Gkiunt and the Duke of York with two Ptincesses'of Castile —
there were frequent points of contact between Spain and England. There was a large
English contingent at the siege of Alge^iras by Alfonso XI. in 1343.

(3) It is interesting to compare with this passage a piece of early French verse
describing a similar entry of Love, and quoted by Boquefor^ "Etat de la Po4sie
Eran^aise,” &o., p. 812.

A MEDIEVAL SPANISH WRITEE.

829

cipices,” of the tambourine, “without which nothing else is worth a
peach,” or of the violin with its “ sweet skippings,” its tones, “ soft
and sleepy at times, at others high and shrill,” and *4ts sweet,
savoury, clear, and well-defined notes,” which please and charm all
hearts.

Never at any time had there been such merry-makings, sucdi great and
universal rejoicings. The hiUs and plains are full of minstrols. ^e roads
are crowded with great processions of men in orders who grant pardons to the
people. Laity and clergy ore there, and in the procession walked the Abbot of
Bordones.

**Tho Cistercian orders, and those of St. Benedict, th^ order of the Black
Cross, with their blessed abbot— so many are the orders that 1 cannot write
them down. Fentte, exultemus, they sing clearly and loud.

** The order of Santiago with the llospitallers, Calatrava and Alcantara, and
those of Buenaval ore there. Of holy abbots there are many at the festival.
Te Amorem /audamus, sing thdy all to Love. There go the Preachers of St.
Paul. St. Francis is not there, but his fnars are not lacking. There, too,
are the Augustinians singing their songs; ministers and priors shouting
EoimUemm et Itetcmur.*'

The Friars of St. Anthony, the Carmelites, all the female orders,
Cistercians, Dominicans, and Franciscans, together with knights,
squires, and town-folk, all are gathered into grotesque union round
the standard of Love.

** From the quarter of the sun I saw a banner approaching, white and
resplendent, higher than the rocks. In the midst was figured an image of a
lady, worked aU with gold, so that you could not soo the stuff. On her head
she wore a noblo crown of precious stones ; she was adorned with love, and her
hands were full of every precious gift. Nor Paris nor Barcelona could buy the
banner. '

** After a great while I saw him who bore it. Resplendent and beautiful,
ho smiled upon all the world. France could not buy the garments which he
wore, and the Spanish horse he rode was of exceeding value.”

Next we have a lively account of the disputes between the various
classes represented in the procession for the honour of entertaining
Love. Tho monks and friars offer “famous monasteries, large
refectories, and spacious sleeping-chambers.” The secular clergy, in
their turn, are eager to warn Love against accepting the invitations
of the regulars. “ Seuor ! they will give you beds without clothes,
or clothes without bread. They have large kitchens, but there is
little meat in them, and their wine is but a great deal of water
coloured with a very little saflfron.”

“ Senor, be our guest ! ” cry the knights. “ Nay,” say the squires,
“ beware of them ! For they will make you play at tables with
loaded dice, and rob you of your money. They are swift to plunder,
but slow to fight. . . . They are the &st to come to the counting of
iho spoils, and the last to go to the defence of the frontier ! ” The
nuns offer him shelter, but the whole assembly with one voice warns
Love against “ their empty promises, their dainty speeches and pretty

830

A MEDliEVAL SPANISH WHITER.

lookSj their amoroiis gestures and mocking ways/^ Amid them all
Love knows not where to turn, till at last the Archpriest kneeling,
beseeches him to lodge with one whom he had brought up from
childhood, and to accept the hospitality of his little house/’ Loyo
consents and the great procession disperses.

We have no space left to dwell upon the elaborate description of
Love’s tent with its painted walls, its cords of silk and the ruby which
blazes at its topmost point. Upon the inside walls are emblematical
pictures of the months, a well-worn theme, but Juan Buiz has treated
it with a great deal of freshness and originality. For the general
idea, not only of the personified months but of the tent itself, he is
indebted to a thirteenth-century version of the Romance of Alex-
ander, made by Juan Lorenzo of Segura ; but in comparing the two
descriptions, one realises how little he has really borrowed, and how
loyal he is in matters of detail to the records of his own senses and
his own experience. His month-picturos are careful transcripts,
often more literal than poetical, from the rural life of his own neigh-
bourhood and time. As we read his mention of gathering the
mountain hay,” or ^'dismantling the mountain huts,” we are
reminded of the position of Hita upon the eastern slopes of a rugged
chain of mountains, whose heights and ravines were well known to
the poet, while his account of the grains and fruits of summer may
well be a reflection from the harvest wealth which decks the plain
between Hita and Siguenza. With the processes of harvest and
vintage, with the details of the wine-cellar and the farm-yard, his
life had made him familiar, and he catalogues them here with all a
countryman’s tenderness, and with every now and then a flash of
poetry, caught from " the new grass in the old fields” ^ of April, or
the flowers and ripening winds of June. It is this truthfulness iii
detail which is his chief merit, and, to those who read him in tho
antiquarian mood in which such work is best studied, his principal
charm.

After the concluding scenes of Carnival and Lent, the rest of tho
book drags a good deal.* And yet it contains a curious account of a
Platonic friendship between the Archpriest and a nun, which elevates
the characters of both' as long as Garoza lives to keep her friend
straight. Urraca brings about the acquaintance, and the fables told
by her and Garoza are some of them excellently given. Among
them is a kind of early Faust-story which reappears again, shorn of
most of its details, in the " Oonde Lucanor,” and afterwards with the
detaih restored in an English seventeenth-century collection of fables

(1) OompaM the lines in the Assembly of Foules,"*-

« For out of olde feldes, as men saithe,

Cometh this newe oome fro yere to yere.”

A MEDLffiVAL SPANISH WRITBE.

831

by Sir Roger TEstrange. Sir Roger got it from the fables of
Abstemius, an Italian fabulisti who flourished about 1580 ; but
where Abstemius, who was a natiye of Ancona, got it from — ^whether
through any connection with the Spanish College at Bologna, or from
some source common both to him and the Archpriest— does not
appear. The twenty-nine fables told by Juan Ruiz are for the
most part taken from one or other of the popular mediaeval versions
of JBlsop, though to many of them he has given a, strong local turn
and colour. The pedigrees of the few that are not to be found in
ASsopian collections, are by no means easy to trace. Spain, however,
with her ready access to Oriental treasures, has always been unusually
rich in fables as in proverbs, and her early fable-books are full of
specimens unknown to other European literatures.

At length TJrraca herself dies, and there is nothing left to the
Archpriest but to bewail her loss in a long poem on Death, and to
send forth his book to the world. In his dirge there are one or two
fine passages, such as, —

** Health and life are ever quick to change. They are gone in a moment
when a man looks not for it. The good which thou, thinkeet to do to-morrow ia
hut naked apeech ; clothe it with ita deed before death overtake thee,*'

Or again,—

“ 0 Death ! thy dwelling for ever is the deep hell ! Thou art the first eyil,
thou art the second evil. To people thine accursed dwelling-place thou dost
unpeople the world. Thou sayest to all, * 1 only change all things ! ’ ”

The poem winds up with some striking and imaginative lines on
Christ's conflict with death — ^lincs which make the grotesque
profanity of one or two passages in the last sections of the book
come with a double shock to the reader. Let us hasten over them
to the last poem of all, which contains Juan Ruiz's farewell direc-
tions as to how his book is to be read.

** Let any man who hears it, if he is skilled in verse-making, add to it or
amend it as he pleases. Let it go from hand to hand to whosoever a^ for it.
Like a ball tossed by the ladies, let him catch it who can. Since it concerns
virtuous love lend it willingly, neither slanderiog it nor overpraising it. Do
not sell it for money, nor let it out for hire, for pleasiure and wit and virtuous
love ought not to be bought and sold.”

Then with a half-jesting appeal to his audience, in the manner
of jonglmrSy^ for the guerdon of their prayers, the thread of the
Archpriest’s connected poems breaks off. So lightly ends a light
book.

To turn to Chaucer’s farewell to his “ tragedie ” at the end of
Troilua and Crmida after reading this passage, is indeed to wander
into another country altogether, to pass from something arid and

832

A MEBUfiVAL SPANISH WBITEE.

sunny to a land of wells and shadows. The poetry, the passion,
the humility of those exquisite lines, are wholly out of Juan
Buiz’s reach. In him the abiding sense of moral problems on
the one hand and moral beauty on the other which meets us in
Chaucer is all but lacking. All that is serious in him springs
either from certain impressions of natural awe, such as the fear of
death, or is the conventional expression of an imposed creed. What
remains when these are put aside is the man’s real and characteristic
work, and the prevailing notes of it are gaiety and scepticism. In
spite of his acquaintance with the Trouvdres, the influence of the
lyrical and romantic side qf French literature upon him — ^the side
which had most effect upon Chaucer and his school — seems to have
been little or nothing. It is not in love as chivalry defined it, not
in ideal landscape such as the Bomance of the Bose popularised in
Europe, not in extravagant sentiment such as the troubadours
glorified, that Juan Buiz takes any real delight. He copies the
French poBtourelks but only that he may caricature them, and he
once mentions the famous names of Tristan and Iseult for the sake
of pointing a satire on his brother clergy. All that he borrows
from the French seriously, is borrowed from the fabliaux. With
the fabliaux, and with the Boman de Benard he has closer literary
affinity than with anything else. He ean hardly have seen the
Bomance of the Bose, or he must have made use of it in his
procession of Love. Jean de Meung, indeed, the author of the last
half of the Bomance, only died while he was writing his later
poems. In some ways he is not unlike Jean de Meung, though far
less in earnest. He has the same satirical tendency, the same love
of detail and actual life ; but of depth or subtlety of feeling, of any
tragical sense of the burden and the mystery of things, this lively,
garrulous singer shows little trace. There is nothing in him
which recalls Dante, nothing which foretells Chaucer’s richer work.
What he has are the gifts of the story-teller and the satirist ; a
quick appreciation of the main features of ordinary character, a
power of making details effective, recklessness, daring, an eye for
the biiUiant and splendid, for the ruby on Love’s tent, for the
heron’s neck and sparkling eyes of Endrina, and the barbaric wealth
of Carnival’s triumph. And besides this, he has the shrewdness of
a man of the world, a &culty of happy sententiousness as befits
the compatriot of an Oriental civilisation ; no moral earnestness, but
the power of making an ingenious use of moral commonplaces. He
is not without a certain permanent literary worth ; but- even if his
Utezary merit were much less than it is, Us value for the study of
manners and for the comparative study of literature would still be
'great.

Mary A. Ward.

EOHm AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

Englishmen ^ho lovo the fame of their coniitry have had such a quart
d'heure during the present month as has hardly been possible since the bad
days of Lord Liverpool and Lord Gastlereagh. We have learnt something
of the bitterness with which a French patriot may have seen in 1870 the
adventurer who was then master of Franco dragging two countries into an
unjust, purposeless, and disastrous struggle. On the 9th of November,
Lord Beaconsfield, at the close of a speech in the City of London, astonished
and alarmed his hearers by talking in this strain : — If the struggle comes
it should be recollected that there is no country so prepared for war as
England, because there is no country whose resources are so great.
England will not have to inquire whether she can enter into a second
or third campaign. In a righteous cause England will commence a
fight that will not end until right is done.” At first people supposed
that this was only the ^^rodomontade and balderdash,*’ to borrow
Mr. Bright’s account of it, to which we have all of us so long
been accustomed in the man, half political bravo, half comedian, to
whom a cruel destiny has given on official right to speak in the name
of Great Britain at one of the gravest moments in her history. It was bad
enough, this odious blowing of the war trumpet, under any circumstances,
but under the circumstances of the hour it was — why should we not give
its real name ? — an infamy. For to what were these words an answer?
To implacable designs just discovered ? To a hostile dispatch ? To a
dangerous intrigue ? To a menace ? They wore the answer of the highest
representative of the English nation, a nation so fervently desirous of peace,
so unwilling to bo behindhand in generous recognition of highminded pur-
pose, so ready to meet good feeling by good feeling, to the following
words on the part of the Emperor of Russia : —

** His Majesty referred more especially to his relations with England.
He said he regretted to see that there still existed in England an * invete-
rate * suspicion of Russian policy and a continual fear of Russian aggression
and conquest. He had on several occasions given the most solemn assur-
ances that he desired no conquest, that he aimed at no aggrandizement, and
that he had not the smallest wish or intention to be possessed of Constanti-
nople. All that had been said or written about a will of Fetor the Great
and the aims of Catherine H. were illusions and phantoms ; they never
existed in reality, and he considered that the acquisition of Constantinople
would be a misfortune for Russia. There was no question of it, nor had it
ever been entertained by his late father, who had given a proof of it in 1828,
when his victorious army was within four days’ march of the Turkish
capital. His Majesty pledged his sacred word of honour in the most
earnest and solemn manner that he had no intention of acquiring
Constantinople, and that if necessity should oblige him to occupy a

834

HOME AND EOBEIGN AEEAIBS.

portion of Bulgaria^ it would only be provisionally, and until peace
and the safety of the Christian population were secured. Bis Majesty
here reverted to the proposal addressed to Her Majesty’s Government
for the occupation of Bosnia by Austria, of Bulgaria by Russia, and of a
naval demonstration at Constantinople, where, he said, Her Majesty’s
fleet would have been the dominant power. This, His Majesty thought,
ought to be a sufficient proof that Russia entertained no intention of occupy-
ing that capital. His Majesty could not understand, when both countries
had a common object — namely, the maintenance of peace and the
amelioration of the condition of the Christians — and when he had given
every proof that he had no desire for conquest or aggrandizement, why
there should not be a perfect understanding between England and Russia —
an understanding based on a policy of peace, which would be equally bene-
ficial to their mutual interests, and to those of Europe at large. * Inten-
tions,’ said His Majesty, * are attributed to Russia of a future conquest of
India and of the possession of Constantinople. Can anything be more
absurd ? With regard to the former it is a perfect impossibility, and as
regards the latter I repeat again the most solemn assurances that I entertain
neither the wish nor the intention.’ His Majesty deeply, deplored the
distrust of his policy which was manifested in England and the evil effects
it produced, and he earnestly requested me to do my utmost to dispel this
cloud of suspicion and distrust of Russia, and charged me to convey to Her
Majesty’s Government the solemn assurances he had repeated to me.”

This dispatch (Nov. 2) had been in the hands of the English Government
for nearly a week, though it had been carefully concealed from the English
people, and was only allowed to be known by them three weeks after its
arrival, and then only at the express solicitation of the Emperor of Russia
himself. ** Ah, it is very well,” cry the malignants who want to plunge
us into the most monstrous war that England could undertake, — it is very
well for the Czar to assure us of his pacific wishes. But he is not all.
There is the people of Russia, there are the troops, there are the generals.”
As if Lord Beaconsfield’s gratuitous and unprovoked defiance — ^which the
man who thinks himself the double of Burke may pQjcbaps suppose to be
after the manner of Chatham — ^were not the readiest possible instrument
that the baleful genius of strife could have put into the hands of the
Russiim war party. Is it any wonder that, stung by the ignoble bombast
with which the Premier met his own honourable and magnanimous words,
the Emperor proceeded to make the memorable declaration at Moscow
(Nov. 18) : — Should I see that we cannot obtain such guarantees as are
necessary for carrying out what we have a right to demand of the Porte,
I am firmly determined to act independently.” And if it unfortunately
comes to ibis, neither Lord Beaconsfield nor anyone else will prevent
the larger half of the English nation from believing that the Emperor has
no other course left open to him, and from peremptorily refusing to check
him in a wholly righteous ^d honourable work.

Meanwhile, the Czar’s words to Lord A. Loftus have made the profound
impression in England which he hoped or foresaw. The withholding of

HOME AND FOEEIGN AFFAIBS.

836

fho dispatch that eontainod thedi gives to Lord Beaeonsfield’s Mansion
House speech a more sinister complexion. The very order in which
the dispatches are published, not being the chronological order, looks
unpleasantly like an attempt to mislead, as making the Czar's pacific
assurances follow, instead of preceding. Lord Derby’s renewed suggestions
of a Conference. One is loth to suspect English ministers of deliberate
attempts to hoodwink the country, but it is impossible to forget that we are
dealing with the man who did his best to hush up the Bulgarian atrocities, and
with a leader of the House of Commons who recently took occasion to
express his contempt for the opinion upon foreign afiairs of the people who
elect the House of Commons. It is singularly unfortunate, too, that
Lord Derby should have for this once plucked up the courage of epigram.
Bos locutm est — that traditional prognostic of peril to the state. He
informed the Bussian minister that he thought the publication of the Czar’s
pacific assurances might be opportune, since the last few da^l^ had brought
us the intelligence of the mobilization of a considerable Bussian force, and
of the emission of the new Bussian loan for 100,000,000 of roubles.” If
Lord Derby meant this for epigram, we cannot conceive epigram more
shockingly out of its place. If he meant it gravely, it was both clumsy
and superfluous ; and it was insincere, because if the publication of the
dispatch was so opportune, ho ought not to have needed strong pressure
from the Emperor to induce him to give it to the public — ^that public which
he called, in irony as it should seem, his ** employer.”

So far as we can tell, after taking some trouble to find out, the general
wishes, opinions, and intentions of the constituencies whose bidding Lord
Derby professes his anxiety to do, may be roughly expressed in these
propositions.

1 . That England ought to agree with Bussia in finding an effective way

of guaranteeing better government in the insurgent and oppressed *
districts.

2. That if England and Bussia cannot agree, then England should stand

aside and let Bussia do her best, oven if that implies temporary
occupation of the provinces.

8. That England should let Bussia understand that an attempt to occupy
Constantinople, or to come within a certain distance of it, will, as the
English are at present advised, be regarded as a casus belli ; short
of that, Bussia will have our best wishes.

4. That England repudiates finally any responsibility for the sovereignty,
independence, and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and
will under no pretext, and on no pleas whatever, wage any war on
behalf of such integrity or sovereignty.

Bight or wrong, wise or unwise, this we believe to represent the views of
five English voters out of six.

Of course it was not to be expected that the Czar’s assurances would
pass without reference to Khiva. There is no space here to discuss the
entire set of circumstances connected with the occupation of Khiva. The

3 K

VOL. XX. N.S.

896

HOME AEB FOBEIGH AFFAIBS.

beet opinion is, first, that we had no right and no business to meddle between
Bussia and Shiva ; second, that the Czar’s undertaking not to occupy was one
of those undertakings which a wise man would not have allowed his good
feeling to coax him to give, because the irresistible exigencies of things
might easily prevent him from carrying it out. Here is the opinion of the
most impartial witness that we can find : —

The attitude of England toward Bussia with regard to Central Asia can
hardly be called a dignified one. There are constant questions, protests,
demands for explanations, and even threats — at least in the newspapers and
in Parliament — ^but nothing ever is done. Outcries were made about the
expedition to Ehiva, but when the occupation had once become a fait
accompli, the same men and the same journals said that no harm was
done. Again, there were outcries and questions about the possibility
of a Bussian movement on Kashgar. Now, after Ehokand is occu-
pied, the conquest of Kashgar is looked upon as not so alarming after
all. At present there is a similar uneasiness about Merv, and the Busso-
phobist party are using all their efforts to show either that the Bussians
must not be allowed to take Merv, or if they do take it that Herat must be
occupied. In all probability the English Government will do nothing at
all. It would seem wiser and more dignified, instead of subjecting the
Bussian Foreign Office to constant petty annoyances, to allow the Russians
plainly to understand what limits they could not pass in their onward
movement. A state of mutual suspicion bodes no good to the relations' of
any government.” — (Schuyler’s Turkestan, ii. 269.)

And the future historian will tell exactly the same tale of the wavering,
maladroit, clumsy, inept, and mischievous conduct of the English Govern-
ment throughout the far more important negotiations of the present year.

Let us resume the story of the events of the month. First there was
the tragi-comedy of the armistice. After their first reverses, the Servians
thought that all was over with them, and they applied to England to obtain
a suspension of hostilities. The Porte was about to consider it, when
Tchemaieff, having revived the courage of the Prince of Servia, resumes
the offensive. He is beaten back. Europe is of opinion that there must
be an armistice. England takes the affair in hand, and Sir Henry Elliott is
charged to present an ultimatum. He declares that if Turkey will not
grant an armistice of at least six weeks, he has instructions to break off
diplomatic relations. The Porte as usual does more than is asked. It
grants six months. ** Six months ! ” cries Bussia, supported by Italy ;

but this is a gross and odious trick ! That will bring us to the spring,
the very season that is most favourable to the Turkish forces, while the
Servian militia cannot rest on their arms all through the winter. It will
be practically a surrender of them into the hands of their enemies.” While
this dispute was going on as to the length of the armistice, war went on by
the banks of the Morava. Tchemaieff and Horvatovitch defended the road
to Belgrade in advance of Deligrad and Krajevatch. The Servian army
was drawn up in a semicircle on the heights, protected by entrenchments
and redoubts. But the Turks, who were both better armed and superior in

HOHE AED POBEiaN AEFAIES.

887

numbers, did not hesitate to attack. The straggle lasted for several days.
The Russian officers and volunteers fought with prodigious gallantry, but
the Servian militia did not hold their ground. They gave way, and so the
Turlcs carried Djunis and Alexinatz, which opened the road for them to
Belgrade.

The Czar could not witness the complete ruin of Servia. On October 80
he sent instructions to General Ignatieff, at once to present an ulti-
matum requiring an armistice within forty-eight hours. The Porte yielded ;
an armistice of six weeks was accorded without conditions. There was an
immense feeling of relief throughout Europe, and the public funds went
up rapidly. All danger seemed at an end, but to settle the different points
in dispute it was necessary to summon a Conference. It was the Czar who
proposed it, almost before the armistice had been agreed to (Nov. 2). He
urged the English ambassador to press his government to promote a Con-
ference at the earliest possible moment. Lord Derby of course assented,
and two days after the suggestion had been urged by the Czar, the English
Cabinet proceed to arrange a Conference (Nov. 4). All the Powers
accepted the proposal with eagerness, except Germany, who insists that
Eastern affairs are no concern of hers. Still Germany did not refuse, so
groat was her desire to contribute to the maintenance of peace. Turkey
hesitated. She had the keenest aversion to a Conference, whose business
would evidently be with her own affairs and relations, domestic and
foreign. Her resistance is intelligible enough, but in spite of her hesitation
people believed that she would yield, and all Europe was full of hope, when
suddenly two thunder-claps resounded in the air. Lord Beaconsfield spoke
in the City, and the Czar replied at Moscow. Immediately, like birds of
ill omen, violently alarming reports fly over Europe. Six corps d’armee are
mobilised in Russia, and their commanders appointed. Prince Gortchakoff ex-
plains that this increase ought not necessarily to be interpreted in a warlike
sense, but that Russia was obviously bound to hold herself ready for every
contingency. At the same time the transport of merchandise was suspended
in the railways of the south, so as to leave the linos free for the transport of
troops, and all exportation of horses was forbidden. If the Porte had
rejected the Conference, no doubt war would have followed with very little
delay. But England exerts a violent pressure, and Turkey once more gives
way. Europe breathes again, and hopes of peace revive. Nearly half of
the time of the armistice has already gone, and the Conference has not yet
assembled. What will come of it when it does assemble ? What is certain
is, that never did diplomatists meet under more menacing circumstances.

Let us examine the disposition which each of the Powers brings to the
Conference. Let us begin with Russia, the active personage of the drama.
The strong general inclination of her government for peace is shown in the
honourable and high-minded words of the Czar to the English ambassador
at the beginning of the month. Her special programme is nominally the
same as that of England, but understood in a different sense, especially as
to the manner of execution. For Servia and Montenegro all the world is
of one mind. They must be restored to the status quo^ perhaps with some

3k2

838

HOME AND FOBEION APFAIBS.

slight increase of territory towards the coast for the Montenegrins ; they
have well deserved it by their epic valour. For Bosnia, Bulgaria and Herze-
govina, Bussia demands not the independent situation of Servia, but equality
for the Christians, the disarmament of the Mahometan civilians, and a measure
of self-government sufficiently real to prevent the country from being plundered
by the Turkish functionaries, who literally pillage and devour the countr3^
Above all it is necessary to prevent the recurrence of such abominable
horrors as those which have provoked the indignation of all Europe. This
is what Bussia wants, and this is also what every other nation wants except
the Hungarians. But between Bussia and England there is this essential
difference, that the former seriously means to have the programme executed,
even if the sovereignty of Turkey suffers in consequence, while Lord
Beaconsfield is bent above all things on saving this pretended independence.
Bussia is logical. She really wishes to secure the end which is the pro-
fessed aim of all. The English cabinet wishes two things, each of which
excludes the other : — to ameliorate the condition of the Christians and t#
entrust the Turks themselves with the task of carrying out reforms.
Nobody accuses the Turks of want of good will ; it is executive power that
they lack. Do we want a proof of this, glaring and palpable enough to
satisfy even the English cabinet ? Lord Derby peremptorily demanded that
the surviving victims of the Bulgarian abominations should be compensated,
and their butchers punished. Lord Derby has obtained nothing whatever
in either direction. The wretched Bulgarians will perish of misery
this winter, and the chiefs of the murderous bands walk about unpunished,
and boast of their exploits. Yet it is as plain as can be that the Porto has
every interest in satisfying England on this point. Why docs she not do
what is asked ? Simply because she cannot.

Lord Hartington, in an admirable speech that has received the almost unani-
mous approval of English opinion, has arrived at the conclusion that there can
be no spontaneous reforms in Turkey, ** because the spirit and the men are
both wanting.” Serious reforms are as impossible in Turkey as they were
in the States of the Church. The Koran is the basis of the government.
The present Sultan, in his proclamation on his accession to the throne,
declared the cause of the^ decay of Turkey to be the neglcjct of the prescrip-
tions of the Book. The Softas, the Old Turks, all the forces of Islam that
ore in movement at this moment, and have given a semblance of vigour to
the Sick Man, are necessarily attached to the Koran and tho old traditions.
How, then, put in practice reforms that are tho negation of the very
principles that form the State? It has long been promised that, at
least before the tribunals, the Christians should be on an equality with the
Mahometans. There is not a trace of such equality as yet. So then, in
spite of any number of proclamations of the equality of all before the law, in
Bulgaria and Bosnia the situation wiU remain exactly what it is now. The
armed man, dl violence, and accustomed from his earliest memory to abso-
lute mastery, will never, as long as he can help it, abdicate a power that
gives him so many advantages, merely because some word comes from Con-
jstantinople. In Aisia Minor the Mussulmans are equally pillaged and ruined
by ihe governors and eveiy other official from top to bottom of the hierarchic

HOME AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

839

ladder. Bead the narratives of travellers of every nationality. They ar^
unanimous on the point. We can dream of nothing worse than Turkish
administration, even when exerted over Turks. What must it be, then,
when exerted oyer Christians? This barbarous regiine was tolerable so
long as manners were simple, and little money was needed. Now that
governors and subordinates alike are bent on enjoying European luxury,'
and that the government itself has a budget after the European fashion, the
necessity of procuring money is such, that to satisfy it the provinces are
being literally ruined. The Porte will grant to Bulgaria and Bosnia local
autonomy, representative institutions, civil equality, just as if they were an
English county. In practice these grants, as Mr. Gladstone said, will be,
as they have been, worth no more than .the rag of paper they are written
upon. The tax-collector will go on robbing the tax-payer ; the Mussulman
Landowner will go on robbing the peasant ; the Zaptieh will go on pillaging
and beating the inoffensive rayah. So long as the authorities are Turks,
for all these wrongs there is no remedy possible.

Now evidently we cannot find in the provinces themselves the elements
of self-government. The Turks would never submit to authority
in a race which they despise, and this race itself, long accustomed
as it has been to fear and to obey, would in truth be sure to
prove itself incapable of command and administration. The English
solution of the problem, then, ought to be abandoned as impracti-
cable. What remains? To conMo the administration of Bulgaria,
Bosnia, and Herzegovina, to Christian governors of high rank, with force
enough at their disposal to make their authority respected. It is evident
that to introduce a system so antipathetic to Turkish feeling, a temporary
occupation of the provinces would be inevitable. This is beyond all doubt
in the mind of anybody who looks the facts clearly in the face. It is certain
that this is what Bussia will ask. This is the proposal which Lord Derby
felt it his duty to denounce to all the world, by the hasty publication of
Lord A. Loftus's dispatch. The proposal was that Bosnia and Herze-
govina should be occupied by Austria, and Bulgaria by Bussia, while the
fleets of tho maritime powers should assemble before Constantinople.
Austria showed very little readiness to undertake the part that was assigned
to her, and England refused her adhesion in the most peremptory manner.
It is inevitable that this proposition should reappear, and it is from this
that war may spring. Bussia declares expressly that she desires no expan-
sion of territory ; but she insists on a real and effective improvement of the
lot of the Christians. The English cabinet desire this too, but they refuse
the only practical means of arriving at the end. If Bussia is not supported,
she declares that she will act alone. Will the other powers allow this or
will they oppose her, arms in hand ?

The measures of temporary occupation might be rendered less hard for
Turkey, first by confiding the duty of furnishing troops to some country
free from all suspicion of desiring annexation, such as Italy ; in the second
place, by limiting what is meant by Bulgaria. The ^talian force should enter
Turkey as the constables of European peace, and might be maintained at the
common cost, while either Italy or Denmark might furnish the administra-

840

HOHE AND FOBEIGN AFFAIE9.

live peraonneL Exceptional as such a measure seems to be and really is,
still it would not be without precedent. In 1860 there were about 4,000
Christians massacred, mainly by the Turkish soldiers themselves. It was
out of the question therefore to entrust them with the task of putting
down excesses. France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England obtained
from the Sultan a convention authorising the dispatch to Syria of a
corps d*arm4e of 12,000 men. Six thousand French troops were sent, and
proved to be sufficient. Lord Dufierin, the. English commissioner, displayed
the greatest energy, and succeeded in having the Minister of the Interior,

' Fuad Pasha, sent to Syria, and in getting Othman Beg, the cause of the
massacres, hanged. The province was entrusted to a Christian governor,
and since then the situation, if not all that could be wished, has been a great
improvement on what went before. This is exactly what might well be
done now for the Balkan provinces, if — owing to the sullen attitude of the
English cabinet and the passion which has gradually risen in Russia — ^it be
not too late in the day for any pacific solution whatever.

From the day of the unexplained and misunderstood dispatch of tho fleet
to Besika Bay, down to the day of Lord Beaconsfield’s infamous speech at
Guildhall, the Turks have been encouraged to rely on England in the last
resort, and to resist one by one tho demands of Russia.

Germany and Austria may for a while give a hand to Russia for the sake
of avoiding a greater peril ; but as soon as they recover their freedom to
act, they would certainly use it to escape from the evils of that Panslavism
which is evidently their greatest peril in the future. The part to be pla^^ed
by England is dictated by her real interests : at the Conference to sustain
the substantial emancipation of the Christians, and if Turkey resists, to
abandon her to the consequences of her obstinacy — only being ready to
throw a garrison into Constantinople if the need should arise.

The various divergencies of feeling that distract the populations of Austria
manifested themselves in tho Assemblies at Vienna and at Pesth. The
Hungarians cannot bear that Austria should co-operate in any measures
that might strengthen the Slav element in Turkey, because they believe,
and with good reason, that this would hasten the reunion of the Slavs
of the South, which is the inevitable future. But, then, must
whole populations of peaceful and laborious men and women be
sacrificed to all eternity to a Magyar hegemonia ? The Austrian
Germans like the Slavs as little as the Magyars like them, and they
are above all else afraid that intervention, even if it were limited to
Bosnia, would draw the empire into a hornet’s nest. But they at any rate
have a refuge, which would not, it is said, be so very displeasing to many
among them, in the great Germanic Empire. The Hungarians, surrounded
by Slavs, Roumanians, and Germans, can only lose by a change that would
necessarily rob them of the supremacy that they possess at present. Need-
less to say that the Austrian Slavs are in their sentiments wholly opposed
to the Magyars. They are heart and soul with their brethren of the
Balkan. One curious fact illustrates the force of these sympathies. In the
provinoial elections that have just taken place, in every district, even
where the Italian element predominates, the Slav candidates have been

HOME AEH POBEIGN AFFAIRS.

841

chosen. In the governing councils the Slavs are not represented, because
the electoral law is unfavourable to them, and they have systematically
abstained from voting in several provinces. But they are very numerous
both in the administration and in the army. They have therefore to be
taken seriously into account. This consideration, and probably along with
it the uncertainty that reigns as to the intentions of Germany, will impose
neutrality upon Austria, even should Russia pass the Danube. The occu-
pation or even the annexation of the whole Balkan peninsula by Russia
would bring no new strength with it. It would be ruin to her finances,
which are unprosperous enough as it is, and it would be a very
long time before Russia could derive any profit from it. All that has
passed since the troubles broke out, shows that there is no reason for fearing
that either Roumania or Sorvia would easily suffer itself to be absorbed
or assimilated by Russia. It is not England’s affair to meddle : the local
resistances of the Slavs among themselves will assuredly render any conquest
by Russia a very long and very precarious undertaking.

The appointment of Lord Salisbury as Special Plenipotentiary for the
British government at the Conference has given general satisfaction. On
his journey to Constantinople ho has seen the chiefs of France, of Germany,
of Austria, of Italy. From the first two great powers Lord Salisbury
probably learnt little more than ho knew at starting. France and Germany
neutralise one another. Neither of them will stir in the way of active
intervention. What he hoard at Vienna is difficult to surmise, because the
conditions of the problem for Austria are difficult to adjust.

As for Italy the late elections have led to unmistakably pacific resolutions.
The Ministry of the Left have obtained an enormous majority; no less
than 400 votes against the 100 that are left to the old liberal-conservative
party, which has lost some of its most eminent members, including Signor
Visconti Venosta, the distinguished minister for Foreign Affairs. In the
speech on the occasion of the opening of Parliament, important proposals
are announced : electoral reform, readjustment of taxation, and revision of
the relations between Church and State. Only there are two of the projects
which seem self-contradictory. The ministry wish, on the one hand, to
lessen taxation ; on the other to sdengthen the army and to construct
defensive works at the Alpine passes. Yet the one essential thing for Italy
at this moment is to reduce the crushing burden of the taxes and to improve
their manner of assessment. In any case there can be no call for her to
take part in war, if war breaks out. The ministry seems to understand
this, fbr the speech from the throne was absolutely pacific without any
pregnant reserve or too significant arriere pen^ee.

The situation of the ministry will soon become one t>f considerable
difficulty. The majority is too large. It will lack discipline, it will bo
exacting, and will not be slow to spHt up into rival sections, with which it
will not be easy to govern. In regard to the East, Italy will probably
incline, as she has done hitherto, to a Russian policy, in concert with
Germany. And in this she will be right. It is the only way of avoiding a
conflict in which Italy would suffer, even if she took no direct part. May
the people of England, too, make their voice heard, and forbid their

842

HOME ANT> F0BEI6H AFFAIRS. '

government to throw them against their own will into a war, which
even if it were crowned with complete success, could have no result except
to perpetuate oppression and misery. «

Nothing that affects the working of a great popular government can be
indifferent to English observers, and in America at the present moment a
very important contingency has come to pass. Not for the first time in the
history of the American Union, a disagreeable uncertainty has arisen as to
the choice of a President. In 1799 there was a tie between Jefferson and
Aaron Huron, each having 78 electoral votes. The decision between them
fell to the House of Representatives, where it was necessary for one or
other to have a majority of the sixteen States. After seven days of
** dogged balloting *' and incessant intrigue, Jefferson at length received
ten out of the sixteen votes, and became President (1600). In 1824, again,
four candidates received votes ; Andrew Jackson had ipore than John Quincy
Adams, who came next to him, but ho had not an absolute majority. The
election again fell to the House, and at the first ballot Mr. Adams received
the votes of 13 States, which were a "majority, though in the popular
election Jackson had received the votes both of more States and of more
individual citizens than Mr. Adams.

The present crisis is more difficult. It is a case of dispu^jjA votes
and the validity of returns. Mr. Hayes has 166 electoral votl^Spkhout
South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Mr. Tildcn has 184 votes,
without these three States. The three States have 19 votes. If
these 19 votes are given to Mr. Hayes he will have 185, or a majority
of the whole number of electoral votes. The issue, then, turns upon
the votes in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The fact that
in any case Mr. Tildon would have a minority of the voting population
is wholly irrelevant. As we have seen, in 1824 Mr. Adams was in
a minority, but nobody ever talked of that as impairing the legitimacy
of his election, any more than we should dream of demurring to a vote of
the House of Commons because the constituents of the minority outnum-
bered those of the majority. You take political machinery with its
incidents, and so long as the distribution of voting powST — ^for good reasons
or bad — ^is not made to correspond exactly with numerical proportions, then
for so long the preponderance even in a country of democratic theory, like
the United States, or like Great Britain, may constantly go to the minority
of the naium. It is a great pity that the citizens of the Union do not
abolish the farce of a double system of voting. The theory is that the
votes given the other day (Nov. 7), were for a body of 369 wise and open-
minded men, who would set to work in their own minds to think of the
ablest and most patriotic man within their knowledge, and would then on
the first Wednesday in December proceed to choose him as the next Presi-
dent. Of course we all know that, in fact, each of the 869 electors was
]^}edged long ago to vote for one of two men previously selected in party
eauenSf and that he was only made an elector in the assurance that he dare
^t vidate the implied pledge. This utter miscarriage of the theory of
&dirert election is., if rightly read, a lesson to those who have faith in other

HOME AND POBEION AFFAIBS. 843

theoretic schemes with the same, aim o£ distilling extra virtue and wisdom
out of a democracy by ingenious machineiy.

It is true that the system of two stages . of election works well
in the case of the American Senate, which is returned not directly
by the population of each State, but by the State legislatures. And
one does not see why the President should not be chosen by the
great federal legislature, conformably to the principle of the well-known
G-revy amendment in the case of France. Certainly when the time comes
one of these days, to repeal the Act of Parliament which gives its title to
the monarchy in England, and when we follow France and the United
States in modifying the form of our government to suit the other parts of
our civilisation, our people are more likely to move in the lines of M.^Grevy
than in those of Madison and Hamilton. There is another feature of minor
consequence in American arrangements, which, to our eyes, seems of doubt-
ful expediency. The vote for the election of the President of the Union is
taken along with the vote for members of Congress and State offices. It
would surely be more convenient, and it would certainly be more impressive
and dignified, if the vote for the chief post in the government stood inde-
pendently and apart.

These points, however, are less immediately important than the issue of
the existing crisis. At this moment the case is as follows. The Democrats
insist that Mr, Tilden has a majority in the three doubtful States, and that
if a majority is given by the Peturning Boards it will be because the Boards
in these States are passionate and unscrupulous Bepublican partisans,
capable of fraudulently setting aside good Democratic votes, fraudulently
admitting false Republican votes, and otherwise evading a disagreeable
duty. We need not recount the devices on the part of the Betuming
Boards which give some ground for supposing these allegations to be well
founded. Nor need wo examine other points raised by both parties alike,
such as that this or that elector is disqualified by reason of his being an
office-holder. These arc matters for the courts. The constitutional crisis
will come later on. On the first Wednesday in December, the electors
for each State Avill meet and give their votes, and the certificates of the
votes will be delivered to the President of the Senate. On the second
Wednesday in February, Congress in Session will open the certificates and
count the votes. If the votes from South Carolina, Florida, or Louisiana,
are for Mr. Hayes — perhaps, also, if they are for Mr. Tilden — ^the validity
of the return will be questioned. What machinery exists for settling such
a controversy? The Constitution provides none, and the laws provide
none. There has been a temporary rule in force allowing either the Senate
or the House to reject a vote, but this rule is in force no longer, and there
is a difficulty in re-enacting it.. The Senate, which has a Republican majority,
may naturally be unwilling to assent to a rule that would give the power of
rejecting the disputed votes to the House of Representatives, where the
majority is Democratic. How the difficulty will be settled, nobody can fore-
see. . That some sensible solution will be found and agreed upon when the
time comes, nobody who has watched American politics fairly caU doubt.
One or two English newspapers, conspicuous for their hatred of good

844

HOHE AKB POBEIGK AFFAIBS.

causes at home, and of popular government abroad, — ^the same papers that
prophesied a crashing defeat for the Bepublicans in France on the eve of
the last election,— talk about General Grant being called in to play the
Napoleonic part of saviour of society, and they make much sinister mystery
about the dispatch of troops to Louisiana and elsewhere. This nonsense is
as ignorant as if the Gauhis or the Figaro were to predict a coup d'etat in
England, on the strength of a regiment having been marched into Waterford
or Belfast to keep the peace after an election or an Orange procession. So
fetr as we can judge from the American newspapers up to the present date,
though there is naturally a very eager interest and excitement through^t the
country, there is no sign of violent passion. On the day after the election,
when the Bepublicans supposed themselves beaten, they bore the mishap
with perfect cheerfulness and self-possession ; nor is there any reason to
suppose that the party as a whole — that great party to whoso virtue and
patriotism sixteen years ago humanity owes so much — ^will encourage or
sanction a victory of fraudulent intrigue. They seem conscious that the
popular feeling is in favour of a change of government, and that there is a
common desire to see whether the Democrats may not be more successful
than the Bepublicans have been in restoring an orderly state of things in
the still unsettled districts of the South, as well as in improving adminis-
tration in the North. The dangers which they profess to apprehend from
their successful opponents are, a tampering with the public credit, an
inflation of the currency, an encouragement of the southern whites in
terrorising the blacks, and some eoncessidns to the claims by the South for
compensation for losses during the slaveholders’ rebellion.

As we have been speaking of ingenious electoral devices in America, wo
may note a naif observation of a cabinet minister on a most objection-
able device of the same sort in England. - Mr. Cross, speaking at Birming-
ham (Nov. 21), suggested to the Conservatives of that town that as, owing
to the Ballot, the Liberals might fail to divide their votes equally under the
minority system, it was possible that after all the Conservatives might
snatch a seat. In other words he hopes that the device of three-cornered
voting will frustrate the intentions of the electors, and give representation
where even on the proportional principle it is not due. The last contested
general election at Birmingham showed that ten Liberals had 8000 votes
more than were requisite for securing three members. Thus, the Conserva-
tive candidate, had 8500. To beat this the Liberals must have ^ X^QjOO,

» 2

or, say 18,000 voters. But they polled 42,000 ^otes, equivalent say to
21,000 voters. Bo there does not seem much chance for Mr. Cross’s friends,
after all. .The Liberal Association which organizes this vast majority is
actually the whole liberal constituency. Every Liberal has a right of
membdrsh^* subscription is required, and it happens that three fourths
^.1i^.,gy!^at Committee of the Association are workmen. The whole genius
is, opposed to such a democratic organization as this, and
Bever to emulate its popularity or its success.

00., uunB, omr aoyio, uwoov.